#
What kind of person changes a world? The kind of person who does two things. One, she looks
#
around and tries, always, to see the world as it is. We normalize a lot of what is wrong
#
with this world, but a free thinker looks past conventional norms and sees fault lines
#
that may be unseen to others. For example, women have always been second-class citizens
#
in this country, treated as being merely instrumental to the needs of men. It is convenient for
#
men, and even for many women, to keep blinkers on, to refuse to see the full extent of this.
#
But for the sake of our society, it's important to go past these blinkers, to look into the
#
void and give a name to what is there. But this is just the first step. The second step
#
is to actually do something to challenge conventional structures, to make a difference in the real
#
world that goes beyond posturing and signaling and ranting in private. My guest today is
#
one such audacious dreamer who did something crazy a few decades ago. She looked around
#
and saw that women in India didn't really have a voice. They didn't really have a platform
#
where they could express themselves. They didn't have anyone who took them seriously.
#
So she started a feminist publishing house meant to discover these voices, to empower
#
them, to enable the telling of stories that then instantly reached so many others who
#
might have thought that they were alone. The conventional thinking in the 1980s might have
#
been, are they really readers for a feminist publishing house? Forget readers, where are
#
the writers? These questions were flawed because it took a view of the world as it was, and
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is a legendary feminist author and publisher,
#
Urvashi Botalia. Urvashi got involved in the feminist movement in the 1970s when she had
#
a job in publishing. She then decided to combine her expertise with her passion. And in 1984,
#
co-founded Kali for Women, a publishing house dedicated to books by women for women. They
#
published a number of seminal books, and she later branched into starting Zubban books,
#
which continues her good work to this day. As an author, she also published a path-breaking
#
book on partition called The Other Side of Silence, which moved me so much when I read
#
it. Her life has been so rich, and her contribution to Indian feminism and publishing so immense
#
that a single conversation can only capture a small slice of it. And I was so glad when
#
she agreed to give me four hours of her time. I entered the conversation already awestruck
#
and exited it, admiring her even more deeply. We spoke about many things, the persistence
#
of memory, the other side of silence, how women deal with the dormant anger that remains
#
unseen to men, the fault lines that became evident during partition, and data around
#
us even today. I found this to be such a rich conversation. But before we get to it, let's
#
take a quick commercial break. Though I don't have a commercial, but I do have a break.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd
#
Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
#
An online community has now sprung up of all my past students. We have workshops, a newsletter
#
to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community interaction. In the course itself,
#
through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know about the craft and practice
#
of clear writing. There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community
#
at the end of it. The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly
#
thing. So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiaankar.com slash clear
#
writing. That's indiaankar.com slash clear writing. Being a good writer doesn't require
#
God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need
#
to do to refine your skills. I can help you.
#
Urvashi, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
Thank you, Amit. Great to be here.
#
I have to admit that, you know, I've spoken with a lot of formidable women on this podcast,
#
and I feel a little intimidated today because of your enormous body of work, and which is
#
intimidating because it is so formidable and amazing. And also that you're a person who
#
yourself has done so many oral histories, as it were. But perhaps that makes you the
#
best person I could have a conversation with.
#
I can never understand why people feel intimidated by me, you know. I, my own self-image is I'm
#
just your ordinary straight next-door kind of gal. I mean, it's, I got grey hair, but
#
big deal. So do lots of other women. But anyway, don't be intimidated.
#
Great. You've put me at ease immediately. I'm going to treat you like the next door
#
gal. So let's, let's sort of start from your childhood. You were born in 1952 in Ambala.
#
So tell me a little bit about your childhood, your family, where did you grow up? What were
#
those early years like? Give me a sense of the texture of your days as you were growing
#
up. Well, I grew up in Ambala, which was then in Punjab. It had a very strong sense of being
#
Punjabi. It was also where a lot of partitioned refugees travelled and housed, including my
#
parents, both of whom were partitioned refugees, both of whom came independently and they married
#
later. You know, Ambala was like all small towns. Everybody knew everybody else, rather
#
wonderful. We lived in a place called the Grand Hotel, which was like a residential
#
hotel. So people lived there for years and years and years. And we used to sleep outside
#
in the open air under the Imli tree that we had. And we had lots of Radhki Rani along
#
the drive of the house. So I still remember that perfume very well. And I have three siblings
#
and there was a whole lot of children around and we all played a lot together, all kinds
#
of pranks and such like. There are many incidents that stand out in my mind from that time.
#
Some of sneaking into people's homes to steal the fruit that grew on trees and getting caught.
#
I remember that once one of the people who worked with us at domestic help, he was poor
#
chap, pulled into doing these pranks with us and he broke his arm and was really hauled
#
up by the neighbors. We had gone into steel. You know, we would love it because we could
#
break it and take out the pulp and eat it. So there were things like that. My mother
#
was a teacher. She was teaching then at, I think she taught at a school. I can't remember.
#
And my father used to work with the Tribune. The Tribune had moved from Lahore via Simla
#
to Ambala and then eventually to Chandigarh. So he was working in the Tribune and my mom
#
was running the house and working and we had our entire extended family staying with us.
#
My grandmother, my chachas, my Masi, because my parents kind of looked after all of them.
#
I don't know how we managed to live a life because really I think my mom earned 350 rupees
#
and my father earned perhaps 450 rupees. That was it. And we had eight or nine people living
#
in the house and they all got married from there. All my chachas and my mama and others
#
got married from there. We studied in a school called the Air Force School, which later became
#
very historic because it had, you know, in the 60, 62 war or something, a bomb fell on
#
one of the churches that was near the school. By that time we had left. We left at the end
#
of 61, but we were very excited because we had no idea what war meant. We were very excited
#
to learn that our school had been close to some danger point. I also remember well the
#
Janmashtami celebrations that used to be there around us. There was an area called Lalkurti
#
near to where we lived and there was a pond there. So we used to all go off and buy those
#
little mandirs and mitti and all that. Although we are a Sikh family, so there was not much
#
prayer or anything of the Hindu kind. If we went anywhere, we went to the Gurdwaras and
#
we used to go a lot with my grandmother who took part in the communal kitchen, the langar
#
in the Gurdwara. So we loved going with her and sitting with her and making rotis on those
#
big tawaas, you know, chhe saa tortein bat jaati thi and then you could make those rotis
#
and then serving them to people. All that was part of our very sort of open liberal
#
childhood. We moved in 1961. At the end of 1961, we moved to Delhi. My father followed
#
Prem Bhatia, who used to be the editor of the Tribune and then moved to the Times of
#
India and called my dad from Delhi. So my dad came first and then we followed later.
#
And Delhi to me, I still remember the time 16th of December, I think 1961 when we arrived
#
and late night at New Delhi Station or Delhi Station, I forget which one it was. But I
#
was struck by the smallness of the spaces. You know, there were flats as opposed to large
#
sprawling houses. People didn't actually go out that much into the streets to play as
#
we used to. Of course, later when we became familiar with it, we realized that there were
#
spaces that we could find even at that time in Delhi. But it was quite a culture shock
#
for us to come from the wide open spaces of Punjab where you could eat gannas, where you
#
could drink ganay ka ras, where you could actually go anywhere in the city and everyone
#
knew who you were. And so if by any chance you were lost somewhere, somebody went off
#
in the wrong direction, some shopkeeper would come and say, okay, you are Butalia's children.
#
And then they would find us and bring us back home. We used to go, we loved reading and
#
there was a shop, the English Book Depot in the market. And the owner of that shop was
#
a man who just sort of somehow thought that all kids were guests who could come for free
#
to his shop. So he had those standees that spin the spinners of books and comics and
#
all of us would just hang around there sitting on the floor reading. We'd be careful because
#
he had taught us to be careful, but he always allowed all of us to read. And we used to
#
get a treat from my mother every two weeks after our reading when we would be taken to
#
the ice cream shop across the road where we would each get a choc bar and she would eat
#
something else. I forget what and the entire total bill would come to two rupees and fifty
#
pesa that time or two rupees and eight annas because we were also dealing in annas at that
#
time. So there were simple pleasures like that and all around us were signs of partition,
#
which I never at that time recognized. Now with hindsight, with my interest in partition,
#
I can see that Sialkot Sadi House or Lahoriya Di Hatti or Rawalpindi Chappals, etc. etc.
#
All of these places must have been places that refugees had recreated when they came
#
back. So it was, I still remember it with a lot of nostalgia. I have been back many times
#
every time I go to Chandigarh, I try to make a stop in Ambala. But of course, there's so
#
many things now that we no longer recognize. It's changed so much, but still it retains
#
some of that character.
#
One of the things that sort of interests me whenever I talk to my guests is the question
#
of how we are shaped, how we become what we become. And a lot of that is in ways that
#
are invisible or unseen to us at the time. But then when you look back with hindsight,
#
you realize that, oh, this is how things were. Elsewhere you've, for example, spoken about
#
your mother and how she had to deal with your grandmother, who was conventional, who insisted
#
that at mealtimes the men would be served first and saw your mom as a kind of an upstart.
#
But in the way that you describe your mom, it seems to me that while there may not have
#
been the language to articulate any kind of feminism or even the knowledge that such a
#
thing existed, there was nevertheless a sort of lived feminism in terms of just sort of,
#
you know, the constraints that you should not submit to. For example, you know, at one
#
point you've mentioned in this great interview you've done with one of my recent guests,
#
Nadanjana Roy, where you said, quote, my mother encouraged us to help ourselves. She said
#
that there was no way her girls were going to eat less in her house. I didn't have a
#
word for it. I didn't know the word feminism then, but I learned from my mother, but that
#
there was nothing natural about discrimination and that it had to be fought. Stop quote.
#
So I'd love for you to talk more about your mother, just looking back at, you know, how
#
that shaped you. And also, you know, as you're growing up, you know, all the children are
#
kind of going to school, they're playing outside in Ambala, you are, you know, sleeping under
#
the Imli tree and there is that sense of freedom. But in all our lives, in ways that are certainly
#
invisible to men and even I think girls normalize it, there is this sort of disjunction where
#
boys do a certain kind of thing and go in a certain kind of path and girls are supposed
#
to go in the other kind of path and all of that. So as all this was happening around
#
you, you know, is that something that you were aware of and resented or is it something
#
that felt normal to you? And later on you kind of began to see, and I'm guessing your
#
mom's attitudes would have had a lot to do with that. So I'd love you to talk a bit more
#
Yeah, in many ways, actually both my parents, but my father in somewhat unusual ways and
#
in an indirect kind of way. But my mother, yes. So my mother, you know, she left Lahore
#
a little before partition to come and live in Delhi and she was working here living in
#
a hostel alone at a hostel that later. So Miranda house before it actually became a
#
college had a hostel called Miranda house. She lived there and she was there when partition
#
happened and it was from there that she went back to Lahore twice to fetch the family that
#
was there. And one time she brought two younger siblings and the next time when she went,
#
which I think was as late as July of 1947, to fetch her brother and her mother, the brother
#
who I've written about Rana mama, he refused to come and he refused to let my grandmother
#
come and my mother then came back and was had these two children with her. And she described,
#
you know, later when we started talking about partition, she described moments when she
#
remembers the partition violence in Delhi, in particular, one of the Muslim women who
#
lived in the hostel with her and whose parents realizing what was happening, spirited her
#
away somewhere safe, but her possessions were all looted by people screaming out, coming
#
to the hostel, etc. So I think she learned from that time to be an independent person.
#
She and my father knew each other in Lahore and they wanted to marry and he had promised
#
that he would come to Delhi and they would get married. So in the meanwhile, she was
#
living here waiting for him to come so that they could marry. And then, of course, partition
#
happened, but they did marry subsequently in Simla. And by this time, you know, she
#
had no father. Her father had died. Mother also was in now in Pakistan. She was alone.
#
She had older sisters who were married and who didn't bother. And she had younger siblings
#
who she was looking after. She was very much an independent woman making her own decisions.
#
She knew she wanted to marry this man and she did. And my dad, on the contrary, was
#
somebody who wasn't as strong. You know, very often you find women really are able to take
#
their own decisions and men somehow are often much more vacillating. He was vacillating
#
and she and you know, later they told us lovely stories of how there was this one woman to
#
whom he was actually engaged and he didn't know how to say no to her. And then he told
#
my mom, I can't do it. And then she wrote a letter to this woman's father and all of
#
that. Anyway, they married in Simla, a simple wedding. My grandparents at that time, my
#
grandfather was alive, didn't like it. My grandfather was actually OK because when he
#
got to know my mother, he became very fond of her, but they had a very short time together.
#
My grandmother was the conventional Punjabi, you know, sass and she didn't like that there
#
had been a love marriage. She didn't like that there was no the hate. She didn't like
#
that this woman did not necessarily count out to her all the time. So she discriminated
#
against her in all kinds of ways and tried and she lived with us for a long time and
#
tried to impose her will on her. My mother, to keep the peace, would do a little bit,
#
but there was a line she had drawn in her mind, you know, which she would not allow
#
my grandmother to cross. But she found her own ways around it. So one of the incidents
#
that I often talk about is because my grandmother would insist that the men are fed first. So
#
my father would be fed first, the two brothers after, then us and then my mum. And my mum
#
kind of refused to give in to this, insisted that everybody be fed together. But in the
#
early days, she would also tell us that, OK, if this is what's happening, then find your
#
own ways of, you know, subverting this. And one of the things that we used to do was that
#
my grandmother would always sleep in the afternoon and she slept very soundly. And she's aware
#
of salwar, you know, those old fashioned salwars with huge nifas where you put naras in them
#
and lots of gathers and everything. So she used to wear those salwars and have a nara
#
on which she tied her keys. And so we would sneak up and untie the keys when she was asleep.
#
And then we would open the tin trunks that she had in which she kept all the goodies
#
like shakarparas and matthis and et cetera, et cetera. And we'd steal them, gorge on
#
them, be happy, retie the keys. And then when she woke up, she would know nothing. But later
#
she would find out. But it was all supported by my mum that you just do this and do whatever
#
you can. As long as she doesn't find out, you're fine. And if she finds out, I'll stand
#
by you. So that was always there. And then, you know, one of the incidents I remember
#
very well, which for me was really an important moment in my life. My father was working in
#
the Times of India in the tribune there. He used to play cards. He was a gambler. You
#
know, people don't often talk about their parents like that, but he was a gambler and
#
he was a real gambler in the sense that he played for money and he almost always lost.
#
So economically, our home was often in a very tight situation because we couldn't rely on
#
his income. And sometimes I remember this one occasion I've written about it somewhere
#
that waking up in the middle of the night and hearing my dad and a friend of his called
#
Harbans, you know, urgent tones talking to my mother. And they had come from the club
#
where they used to gamble and they'd run out of money and they'd come to ask her for money.
#
So this kind of thing often happened. Then she actually took us all into confidence,
#
even though we were quite young. And she said, look, don't judge your father for this. It's
#
like an illness and we have to learn to help him to deal with it. And that made a huge
#
difference to us. So we actually developed very interesting tactics with my dad where
#
we could talk to him about this, where every time he went gambling and he stayed out late,
#
we would find him. So we fixed a fine of it was called DDR and high, high repair. And
#
that was the top level of the fine. So if he came back at eight o'clock, he'd have
#
to pay us maybe one rupee each. If he came back another time, it would be a little more.
#
But if he stayed beyond midnight, then it was high, high repair. And it was not only
#
for us, but anyone else who was in the house, any child who was in the house. And you know,
#
at that time, cousins and siblings would be visiting. So we'd often have three or four
#
cousins staying with us. So we would have to dole out this money. So it kind of became,
#
it sort of emerged from the silence in which it was, and it became something we could talk
#
about. And in later years, my father remembers because he, he gave that up, but you know,
#
much later, but he did, and then continued to play cards in a kind of recreational way
#
along with my mother, but not gambling, gambling as in gambling. But in some ways, that strategy
#
of hers also humanized him a great deal for us. He wasn't a very patriarchal type of man
#
in the traditional way. He didn't try to impose his will. And I think partly that was because
#
he was married to this strong woman who would counter it if she needed to, but partly because
#
he wasn't that kind of guy. So he became to us a very lovely, very friendly, extremely
#
vulnerable, very modest kind of chap. And we had a really nice relationship with him.
#
And you know, for example, he and I used to drink whiskey together. He would pitch up
#
at my place and with a whiskey glass and not want to open his bottles, but mine and his
#
brother, my youngest cha cha would also do the same. So after my dad passed away, my
#
cha cha and I celebrated, had a celebratory drink in his memory to remember that moment.
#
So all of that I attribute to my mother, what she taught us that you're not in any way inferior.
#
Don't allow yourself to be discriminated against. It is in your hands to resist it a lot. And
#
if you can't do straightforward resistance, find a way around it and also look for people
#
who are your supporters. And in her life, there were so many examples. My dad wanted
#
to have a dozen children. She had four of us in six years. She must have been continually
#
pregnant and she was working through that time. And when my younger brother, the fourth
#
child was born, my mom told the doctor, I'm not having any more. You tie my tubes now
#
and I don't care what the husband says. And the doctor did it. And then she told my father.
#
So she was really quite a woman that way. I sometimes think she's a much stronger feminist
#
than I was because it came to her kind of instinctually in many ways. So I do owe her
#
That's such a lovely story about her empathy for your father's situation and talking of
#
it as a problem that I can relate to in the sense that I was a professional poker player
#
for a few years. That's a game of skill and I did well at it. But in the ecosystem around
#
me, because poker is a game which is on the intersection of skill and gambling. And in
#
that ecosystem around me, I found so many gambling addicts who really in some cases
#
their lives were destroyed by what they did. And in a couple of cases, I tried to make
#
interventions but failed. Even though at a rational level, they knew that this was an
#
addiction and they couldn't help themselves. But they couldn't help themselves. It just
#
was what it was. It's terribly tragic. And maybe had they had kids who tried out the
#
DDR therapy, it might have sort of helped. You alluded earlier to how when you now look
#
back at Ambala and you think of the shop names and there's Sialkot and Lahore and Rawalpindi
#
and all of that. And you realize this new layer opens up which wasn't there at the time.
#
And I wonder sometimes about the texture of our memories. That do they change with time
#
as this added context comes onto the place? And this is perhaps in two ways. And one way
#
is just when you talk about places and events and so on. And the other way could also be
#
this deepening understanding of people better. You know, like I think many of us when we
#
grow up, we see our parents in a certain way. And maybe we see them in a good light. And
#
then later we see them in a bad light. And then later as time goes by, we begin to see
#
them as human beings, not as parents, parents. And we kind of begin to see their situations
#
and their conditions and how they became, what they became. So I'm fascinated by this
#
question of memory. I had an episode with Achal Malhotra also, who's also done work
#
on partition. And one of the things I realized about memory while researching for that episode
#
was that when the way the brain works, the first time we remember something, we are remembering
#
what happened. The next time we are remembering the remembering. And so on down the line till
#
eventually you can have a sort of a Rashomon effect where two people who experience the
#
exact same thing can, you know, remember them completely differently. And for you, you know,
#
how have you experienced this at both the personal level of your own memories in terms
#
of do you feel that your memories of childhood have been deepened, perhaps changed in some
#
ways with the context that you can now put that what was once a memory that would make
#
you happy. Now it's layered with something else or vice versa. And it just in terms of,
#
you know, the people you've spoken to as well. And I'd like to talk much more about your
#
book in detail later. But I mean, your partition work, the other side of silence and so on.
#
And just in terms of speaking to people about their memories, you've seen this process play
#
out and I think memory is not just a linear act that something happened in the past, but
#
and you remember it. But every time you remember it, you are kind of recreating it and it becomes
#
a part of the present as well. So what are your thoughts on this?
#
Well, you asked so many things there and difficult things. So let me start, Amit, by saying that
#
I think in a sense, all of us carry memories inside our heads and our brains filter out
#
the things we either don't want to remember or or they embed them somewhere deeply and
#
there may be an occasion on which that memory might surface and anything could trigger it.
#
An encounter with somebody from that moment or looking at an object from that time or
#
even reading a story about it or some anything could trigger it. But I think a memory in
#
a sense becomes meaningful and and catalyzes other memories in the process of having of
#
talking and listening. So if you are talking to me today about something and I recall in
#
answer to a question that you have asked me in a moment from my childhood or something,
#
I may not have thought about that for the longest time, but your question sparks off
#
something and then that thought stays in my head even after we have stopped talking and
#
somehow more and more opens up and then the next time I'm having a conversation with somebody
#
that more and more will enter the picture. But I think it's also not only that, it's
#
not only instrumental in that way or incremental in that way. I think it is also that the person
#
that I am changes all the time. The person that you are changes all the time and the
#
way therefore you look back on a certain memory also changes. So for me, for example, the
#
fact that in Ambala there were shops named after places in Pakistan, when I experienced
#
those shops meant nothing other than the fact that in Sialkot house my mother bought sarees,
#
in Jane soda water factory we got nice milkshakes or things like that. It meant nothing else.
#
But when I became interested in partition and when I started researching partition and
#
looking at it, suddenly all those things acquired different meanings and I realized that they
#
must have been the places that refugees set up and they came because they carried the
#
memory of those places. Now, I have seen so many such places. I'm just giving you a very
#
mundane example. When I went to, if you go to Amritsar and you go to the Golden Temple
#
and you walk around the bazaar, every second shop has, you know, Jutti ki Dukan, whatever,
#
you know, has a name from across the border. Now, suddenly when I went back to the Golden
#
Temple, the first time I went there, I think it was in 84 or before the Blue Star operation
#
in 84. But after that, I've been back many times and each time those places have acquired
#
other meanings for me because actually I'm thinking so much more about those histories,
#
those moments. At some point, I started to look at the Muslim population of Amritsar
#
and how all of them left and where they used to live in the city. And the next time I went
#
there, the walled city or the old city, which is where the Muslim population lived, suddenly
#
acquired other meanings for me. So in a sense, I think memory also is something that is dynamic
#
and you are quite right. It's never linear because then other things open up which will,
#
it's a bit like. So today I was reading a friend's translation of the Katha Sarit Sagar
#
and it is like you start with one story and then it leads to another and another and another
#
and somewhere they are intertwined and somewhere they are each going off in their own directions.
#
And each time you read that story, it sparks off other stories in your head. So to me,
#
it's a little bit like that. I find it very, very, very rich kind of history or wrong word
#
I suppose. Very rich seem to explore, I guess one could say. I'm continually fascinated
#
by it. And I also am very, very fascinated by the silences of memory because there are
#
things people remember. There are things they consciously put a lid on. And it's not that
#
that memory doesn't go away, but it's articulation is something that doesn't happen. And the
#
question I always have in my mind is, is that because it is unspeakable? Is that because
#
there is no vocabulary to describe it? Is it because there is a fear of what it can
#
unleash if you allow that memory to surface? And what are the kind of struggles that people
#
have with memory? So for example, why is it that victims and survivors of sexual assault
#
during partition have found it so difficult to speak about it, have spoken so little about
#
it? It's everywhere. The knowledge about it is everywhere. And the silence about it is
#
everywhere. And the people, the women who have lived through it, surely this is not
#
something they wiped out of their memory. So to me, that too, the struggle and the need
#
to uncover these silences, and yet the awareness of what the consequences could be, this is
#
all part of the whole engagement with memory, if you like. I don't know if I make sense.
#
No, no, you've sparked off so many thoughts in me. And there's this lovely quote by Krishna
#
Swapti, which you've written about also, where you've in the context of partition, where
#
she says, quote, partition was difficult to forget, but dangerous to remember, stop quote.
#
And when I read this, it struck me that this is not just true in terms of partition itself
#
and what happened there. It's true in a lot of women's lives. Like I was having this,
#
I was part of this WhatsApp conversation a couple of days ago with a group of friends
#
who were talking about how safe are their kids in school and so on and so forth. And
#
at one point, one of my friends who's a mother herself said that, listen, here's the reality
#
that in my generation, before the age of 12, every woman I know was at some point assaulted
#
or abused in some way or the other. And it's just there. And this is, of course, something
#
that is perhaps unseen to the men around them, but it's there. Like Swapti said about partition,
#
it's difficult to forget, but dangerous to remember. And one, how would you react to
#
that observation? And two, when it comes to dealing with memory in this way, where you
#
suppress certain things, but you can't get away from those as well, what are the consequences
#
of coming to terms with it? And what are the consequences of suppressing those memories?
#
Does it free you up to be able to share those memories like so many people did with you?
#
Does it free you up or perhaps do you have to then relive that trauma and so on and so
#
forth? Yeah, you know, I think that's an assumption
#
that I made when I started doing my research. And even before that, when I did some work
#
with civil liberties organizations on doing investigations into things like the Bhagalpur
#
violence and the 1984 violence and so on. And my assumption, for example, as a feminist,
#
when I went into doing research on Bhagalpur, was that there had been sexual violence and
#
that women had kind of suppressed this. And in talking to the women and helping them to
#
open up about it, I would be doing a service of some kind that it would, in a sense, free
#
speech, liberate the person, perhaps help them to deal with it. Actually, nothing could
#
have been further from the truth. And I realized that not only in the reactions that I got
#
from women in Bhagalpur, but also in subsequent work. And I think the question that you asked
#
that, you know, what are the consequences of it? Actually, Amit, we don't know. And
#
the consequences can be really, really serious. And I think that is a real ethical dilemma
#
for those of us who work with people's lives and work with people on the stories of their
#
lives and also work with memory. So I'll give you an example or couple of examples.
#
You know, once I was talking to a young woman and she was very traumatized and she told
#
me she had been part of a research project on partition. And she told me that she had
#
been assigned an interview with a gentleman, a Sikh gentleman, who was a doctor at the
#
time of partition, and he was in charge of a particular hospital. And that she had been
#
told that he has some very traumatic stories and you must try to get them out of him. So
#
she kept pushing, asking him these questions. And she kept meeting resistance, both from
#
him and his wife. And she couldn't understand why the wife was so resentful and angry and
#
so on. And eventually, one day, he told the interviewer this story of how he had been
#
in charge of a hospital and how the hospital came under attack and the nurses and others
#
had locked themselves up in the room and they begged him to kill them. As happened, you
#
know, in many instances. And he did, not all of them, but I think he killed some of them.
#
Now then, having surfaced that memory, you know, he was in a real state. His wife was
#
furious with this young woman. The young woman was frightened because she didn't know what
#
she had unleashed. And she left, never to return. Now, what can you do? So the excavation
#
of memory, I think, isn't a simple task that you can do with the simple assumption that
#
yeah, it's been submerged and it must come out and everything will be wonderful and people
#
will be able to deal with their lives after that. No, it's not that. There are consequences
#
to the life of the person and you have to ask yourself the question as a researcher
#
that what is my ethical responsibility here? To whom am I responsible? To some abstract
#
truth that yeah, I've explored memory and I've revealed this or to the life of that
#
person. And similarly, for example, I still have this dilemma and I haven't figured out
#
what to do with it. One of the things was that during my work on partition, I found
#
completely by accident this book, I've referred to it a couple of times, in a secondhand bookstore
#
in Delhi. And I bought it eventually. In the first instance, I didn't and then I went back
#
and bought it. And it is not a book, book as in a published book, but it was a publication
#
of the Ministry of, I think, external affairs or rehabilitation, I forget what, at the time
#
of partition. And it is a district by district listing of women and children who were abducted
#
and possibly raped. And it gives you the name, the place, the age of the person, her background,
#
which family she belonged to and the possible name of the abductor, the person she was last
#
seen with. Now you can deduce a lot from that book, but one of the great temptations as
#
a researcher was to put that material on the net and to see how many stories it would reveal.
#
But it's been 25 years, I haven't done it. I know that there is one other copy of this
#
book, which is in the Central Secretariat Library. So it's not that it's not a public document.
#
But nobody in the CSEC library is going to put it down, but a researcher like me might
#
put it out. Now what about the families of those women? Often they don't know that the
#
mother or grandmother, whoever that person is, has lived through sexual assault. How
#
will they deal with that knowledge? Can I really do it in the pursuit of some truth?
#
And I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. So in the same way, I think the women
#
in there, suppose I was to find them, I think they would choose silence over speech. And
#
as somebody exploring memory, I would have to respect that choice. So I think it raises
#
a lot of questions about what is ethical practice? What is the purpose of our research? What is
#
truth? What is silence? All of these things come up in connection with the exploration
#
of memory. And yet I do believe that in some ways, opening up memory and making space for
#
remembrance is also part of the battle for justice and recognition and acknowledgement
#
of what people lived through. So somewhere you have to strike a balance. People have
#
to know that this happened, that this happened to people like us, it happened to everybody.
#
And real names, real people. It's like in Berlin, when you're walking in that city,
#
you see those little copper plaques on the pavement and you can never be away from that
#
history. So somewhere we need something to remind us that this is a history that we have
#
to learn from. And it involved real people. And to remember those people is to give them
#
the justice that they were denied, to give them the recognition that they were denied
#
in their lives. Again, I don't know if I make sense.
#
Oh, you make a lot of sense. A lot of threads I want to sort of explore from here. There's
#
a Twitter account which actually does this job of, I'll link it from the show notes,
#
I can't remember the name, which does a job of humanizing victims of the Holocaust. So
#
each thread will be a story of a person with a photograph if there is one. And immediately
#
it's not a number, it's not a statistic, it's an actual person. And that I think is beautiful
#
and important. I'd done an episode a few months back with the writer Amitav Kumar. And he
#
told me about how when he was examining communal riots and reporting on them in a particular
#
part of the heartland, he went to this village where seven years ago, there had been communal
#
violence and Hindus from outside had come. And there was a small conclave of Muslims
#
in the village and they basically killed everybody, except one guy who managed to run away and
#
hide in the fields. But eventually when it was over, he saw that all his fellow Muslims
#
were dead and among the bodies were those of his wife and his children and all that.
#
So you'd imagine that that person's life is completely destroyed and it's over. And then
#
Amitav goes to that village and comes across this man. And he is now living with another
#
wife and with a couple of other kids and everything is completely normal. It's as if it never
#
happened. And that leads me to thinking about how important a part of this process of healing
#
is denial. Sometimes you can say that, let's put it out in the open and come to terms with
#
it, but at an individual level, how do you live? Sometimes the only way you live is by
#
denial. You have this lovely passage, I'll quote from your book, where you write, the
#
history of partition was also the history of widespread sexual violence, particularly
#
rape, abduction, forced marriage, selling into prostitution. And estimated hundred thousand
#
women in both countries are believed to have suffered this fate. For many of them, the
#
history of sexual violation became more complex as time went on. For in many cases, the men
#
who had abducted them ended up marrying them. And because of this, because they were now
#
in relationships with men of the other religion, they became absences in their family, absences
#
that also led in many ways to an absence of memory. For these women's families, once
#
a woman had gone over to the other side, you put that in quotes, no matter that this was
#
not a journey they undertook voluntarily, they cease to exist. Most families that lost
#
female members to rape and or abduction never mentioned them again. So for those of us involved
#
in memory work, here's a question. How do you remember that which does not exist or
#
whose existence is not even acknowledged? How do you force memory or where do you arrest
#
it? Stop quote. You know, and another sort of facet of this denial, which I found very
#
moving was when you speak about how some people, what they have gone through, they do not have
#
a language to even express it. So you point out this story, which a friend of yours recounted
#
of a grandmother who was displaced by partition, who would just stay in the attic all day,
#
and she wouldn't speak in a normal language. She just babbled all day in just some imaginary
#
language. And you write quote, as children, my friend and her siblings were impatient
#
and scornful of the old woman. As adults, they realized that this recourse to babble
#
was the only language she had to deal with the trauma of separation. Stop quote. And
#
I mean, I don't know if this is leading to a question, but you were talking about memory
#
and I remembered, you know, that incident Amitabha told me about and perhaps the importance
#
of denial and perhaps and also the sense that in many small ways in our lives, which have
#
not experienced anywhere near that kind of trauma, that all of us, you know, everybody
#
listening also, maybe there are things we choose not to remember. Maybe there are things
#
about us, you know, things that we might have thought or done or so on and so forth. So
#
I know this is a bit ramly, but you know, what would your responses be to this?
#
So you're quite right to say that there are things we choose not to remember. And I'll
#
go back to that point which you made when you said you were talking to this group of
#
parents and one of the people there said that in our generation, in her generation, women
#
routinely faced sexual violence and didn't really talk about it. So the interesting thing
#
is that, of course, all of us have faced it in our lives. I have so many people, so many
#
women I know all of us have, and we have not spoken about it. But in a sense, it doesn't
#
the memory never goes away. I was thinking the other day, you know, often when I think
#
back to my childhood, somehow the two or three moments of sexual assault that I faced at
#
the hands of neighbors or whatever, they always crop up. I don't know how or why other things
#
get wiped out. Some things come back. But these things remain constant. I was talking
#
to a historian friend of mine the other day. She's quite a well known historian. And she
#
was talking to me about her childhood. And once again, she spoke of a moment in her childhood
#
that remained really sharp and clear. And that was the moment that she was sexually
#
assaulted. And I was thinking to myself how this doesn't go away. So I think at one level,
#
that is true that this memory kind of just stays. But it's also true that we don't have
#
the vocabulary to speak about it. We don't even speak about sex, you know. So how to
#
talk about sexual violation? Where do you get the words to talk about it? Our literature
#
doesn't give us any possibility because our writers also don't really know how to write
#
sex. So in a sense, it's not normalized in our lives. So we don't have the vocabulary
#
to talk about it. Also, talking can only happen when you are talking to somebody. You know,
#
memory becomes meaningful in the telling of it in many ways and the receiving of it. So
#
if you don't have that, then it becomes really difficult. This is why in the women's movement,
#
in the early days, when women of my generation came into feminism, one of the most important
#
things for us was to sit together and talk about our lives, about our feelings. And I
#
still remember the hesitation with which we started to talk about our bodies because we
#
were hesitant. Even married women, for example, having faced domestic violence, were hesitant
#
even to speak about that in public because they had always been taught that this is not
#
a public thing. This is a private matter. So how to speak about it in public? And that
#
articulation started in a very hesitant way. How then to articulate something that lies
#
much deeper? Where do you find the words? How do you talk about it? How do you know
#
you can trust these people? So a lot of women's groups in these listening groups built trust
#
with each other by saying, OK, I'm asking you to tell your story, but I will tell you
#
my story as well so that I too am vulnerable. And that was also a learning experience for
#
us middle class women because even though we thought of ourselves as feminists, et cetera,
#
we went into this thinking, not consciously, but suddenly somewhere in our heads that we
#
don't face any problems. The problems are out there. And we had to learn to recognize
#
that actually they are in our lives and in our things, in our families as well. So in
#
a sense, the difficulty of speech and articulation about issues that lie so deep and for issues
#
for which we don't have words is what impacts a lot of women. Then I want to go back to
#
your other point that you were making about healing and can forgetting or not talking
#
about it or silence be a way of healing? I think people come to healing in different
#
ways. And I think one can't generalize that silence can heal or speech can heal. And I
#
want to tell you a story here of somebody who got in touch with me. So I think several
#
years ago now, maybe seven or eight years back, just out of the blue, I got an email
#
from a man in Canada or in America. And he wrote to me to say that, look, somebody gave
#
me your name. I'm trying to find out my history postpartition. He was a 10 month old infant
#
at the time. And he and his entire extended family were escaping from what became Pakistan
#
to what became India. So they were his father's side of the family and his mother's side of
#
the family. And somewhere close to the Amritsar, the Wagah border, the men, three men were
#
sent off to look for what could be an easier crossing. And those three men were attacked.
#
They went off separately. And it was assumed that they died because they never came back
#
to the kafila that was going. It wasn't a big kafila. They never came back to the group
#
that was going. So then this group was attacked and pretty much everybody in it was killed.
#
This young infant was also left for dead. He was hit on the neck with a machete and
#
the shoulder and thrown on the ground. And then the attackers went away. And then it
#
turned out that a 16 year old boy who was his uncle had escaped the attack by hiding
#
in the bushes. So this is a bit like the Amitav story. And then that boy got out and he saw
#
this infant was alive. So he took off his bag and he wrapped up the infant in that and
#
walked across the border to Amritsar and took him to a hospital and where the child was
#
looked after. A couple of months later, his mamas who lived in Amritsar and which is where
#
the entire family was going to, found him in the hospital and took him home. They adopted
#
him and they made him their son, their fourth son. But he had a different name, you know,
#
Sikh names. So the other three I think were called Rajinder and something. And he was
#
called Rashwal. So he often got asked by people, how come you have a different name? And he
#
had no answer to that. And what he remembers is that when he was 10 years old, a man came
#
to visit and that man took him aside and said, do you know who I am? And he said, no, who
#
are you? And the man said, I'm your father. So this child was a bit shaken and he went
#
off to his father, his adoptive father and said, this is what he's saying. Who is he?
#
And they told him, no, no, he's nobody and he'll never come back again. And that man
#
was sent packing. Now it was his real father who had actually escaped the attack. And when
#
he came, by the time he came back, he found everybody had been killed. So he took another
#
route and he crossed the border and came and then he settled down in Gurdaspur, which is
#
two hours away from Amritsar. Now Rashpal grew up without knowing this history and he came
#
across it when he moved to the States and became a professor there, married, had children
#
of his own. One day he got a phone call from Gurdaspur saying, your father has died and
#
left you all this property. We want you to come back. And that's, he was really shaken
#
and his father-in-law who was with him, then told him his story. And then retrospectively
#
he felt, you know, real sense of betrayal that his adoptive parents had never told him
#
this story, that he didn't know who his father was. And he was angry, felt betrayal, and
#
he was psychologically deeply troubled. But he wanted basically somehow to find out more
#
about where this incident happened, what happened. So that's when he wrote to me saying, can
#
you help me? And of course there are no records, so I couldn't really help him. But what I
#
did do was that I went to Gurdaspur and I found his father's family. And from them I
#
was able to recover some of the story. And then we were able to find out that one of
#
his aunts who had been alive at the time of the attack was in Canada. And so he met her
#
and he got a little more of the story. So for him, the healing was now putting the pieces
#
of this jigsaw together. And then the last stage in that was he wanted to go to Pakistan
#
and see that place where it had happened. And of course he couldn't. How could he get
#
a visa? But amazingly, he persisted for three, four, five years, I think. Finally he got
#
a visa. And he went there. And after that, he felt somehow he could put this history
#
at rest. But by that time, his own family had kind of scattered because they also had
#
to bear the brunt of this thing. So I think that the process of healing can sometimes
#
be really complex. And it can't be that you just tell your story to somebody and that's
#
Read about the story of Rashpal in your book and it's very moving and it also kind of makes
#
you wonder because at a rational level, he must have known that there is no point going
#
down these tracks into the past. Like, what are you going to gain? You never knew that
#
person is over. There's nothing you can really do. But I can understand that the pull nevertheless
#
sort of going back to the question of healing and the fact that all women experience something
#
and men never get it or men never realize it most of the time. Because it's just an
#
extra layer, an extra burden that women carry with them. And I'm just thinking aloud here,
#
but it seems that therefore, it would be natural for this to create a reservoir of anger in
#
women. And I'm guessing that one way to deal with the anger would be to be in denial and
#
to normalize whatever happened and to fit within the patriarchal system and perhaps
#
to perpetuate that patriarchy in your own way as perhaps your grandmother was doing
#
when she said the men eat first. And the other way would be to, you know, live the life of
#
a lived feminist like your mother did, even if you're not actually an activist or doing
#
the kind of things you've done through your life. But even if not that, you sort of at
#
least cast those aside and you live with the kind of freedom. But what I wonder about is
#
that, is there that reservoir of anger and where does it go? You know, if things like
#
this had happened to me, I don't think it would have gone. I think some of that anger
#
would have shaped me and perhaps shaped me in unpleasant, ugly ways. But we don't, you
#
know, when you look around you, the world seems like normal and it isn't there and,
#
you know, but beneath the surface is what are your thoughts?
#
Well, I think I don't think the anger ever goes away. But I think that many women sublimated,
#
they put it aside because they know that the only route to survival is to live within the
#
system and some choose to try and subvert the system from within in whatever possible
#
way they can. So that's what somebody like my mother was doing. You know, she was making
#
her own subversions within the system in which she lived, but she continued to live inside
#
her marriage and to look after her mother-in-law and all of that. Which is why, of course,
#
many feminists, many women who call themselves feminists are in marriages and they know marriage
#
is a patriarchal structure. They know they'll have to make many compromises, but they also
#
know that the complexity of being inside a patriarchal structure where often the perpetrators
#
of that patriarchy are people that you love. So what do you do? You don't, you know, you
#
can't reject them and you can't and you don't want to reject them because you care for them.
#
So you make your compromises and you choose what is it that you can wipe out and forget
#
and what is it that's important enough to perhaps address. But the choice is not entirely
#
a free choice either because you know also the limits. You know that you are living in
#
a system where there is no state support. There are no structures. There is nothing
#
that will give you the support and house you or allow you to make your own life were you
#
to walk out of that patriarchal structure. So then there is, you know, there's home and
#
family, but for home and family you have gone and there's your new home and family. That's
#
all you have. And that's complicated by the fact that the new home and family may be a
#
site of violence, but may also be a site of love and care. And, and then there's nothing
#
else outside the new home and family that's going to provide you that same support. So
#
you make your choices and, and you live with them. And I think that when you become a feminist,
#
for example, you acknowledge that anger, that resignation, that constant, I was talking
#
to some, two of my young male friends yesterday and I was saying to them, you know, you don't
#
see it, but that constant sense of being discriminated against, of being invisibilized in so many
#
ways. I mean, I was saying to them, think of the simplest thing, think of technology.
#
So I teach, I teach at a few universities. I started teaching at Ashoka University some
#
years ago. I have a hundred students in my class. I have to wear a mic. That mic is not
#
made for my clothing. It's made for male clothing. It's made for somebody who's wearing a suit,
#
who can pin it on the lapel, who has a pocket. I don't have any of those things. Every time
#
I hold that mic in my hand, I feel the sense of anger that why does technology only take
#
the male body as a norm? So this is just a very small example. You see, you face it all
#
the time, every day. And, you know, you, you make a choice, whether it's a conscious choice
#
or not. If you allow that anger to corrode you constantly from within, then you're going
#
to be deeply unhappy. So you make a choice and say, okay, you know, these things, okay,
#
I'll just wipe out and I will focus on the real issue. So women of my generation, when
#
we faced a sexual assault or harassment or something, we just let it slide. We kept quiet
#
about it. Now, partly it was because we had no structures where we could actually articulate
#
it, explain it, talk to anybody. So we knew that nothing was going to come of it. But
#
partly it was also because we made a choice and we thought, okay, leave this aside. Today,
#
young feminists find that very, very shocking because they, their anger is so strong and
#
they don't want to even bear one minute of it. And they feel that the older generations
#
kind of compromised us by, by allowing this to happen. And it's true, of course, to some
#
extent. So I don't know that anger, you know, women have to deal with it and they do, they
#
find different ways of dealing with it. But sometimes you'll find women getting possessed.
#
That's also a way of dealing with the unexpressed emotions that usme to a comes to come through
#
a freedom to do what you like. When you talk about the dilemma of living in homes where,
#
which are the site of violence, but which are also the site of love. I'm reminded of
#
bell hooks writing about how much she loved her father and how much, you know, it's not
#
just about anger and hatred. That dilemma is there and these are still the men you love.
#
So what do you do and where do you go from there, which is such an everyday thing. And
#
you mentioned that lapel mic and the metaphor I like to use is that of air conditioning,
#
that you know, air conditioning in most offices, you know, began in the 1950s and there were
#
only men in offices. So it was set at a particular temperature. And the point is that at that
#
temperature women's bodies, they just feel cold, you know, their optimal temperature
#
is a little higher. And yet air conditioning temperature has kind of remained like that
#
because world designed by men for men and so on and so forth.
#
I mean, I face it every day when I drive my car and I bought a new car three years ago
#
and I searched, I'm short, right? So I need some thing that allows me to push the seat
#
forward to reach the pedals. And I searched and searched for a car where my knees did
#
not come up against a dashboard, but it was difficult. So finally I've chosen one where
#
they came up least against the dashboard, you know, but it's just not made thinking
#
of, you know, five foot nothing or five foot two, which is the average height of the Indian
#
woman. Okay. Can we make a car that allows for that? No, we make a car that allows for
#
five, eight, five, nine or something like that. And you have to just make do.
#
Or you know, I mean, pockets being another sort of example of that. And we are actually
#
recording just a day after the Supreme court judgment in the U S and bro versus Wade, which
#
essentially says that women don't own their own bodies in a manner of speaking. And you
#
know, I should sort of lead to a sense of rage among everybody, I guess. But it also
#
shows you that besides gender, there are all these other factors playing into the game,
#
like ideology and religion and all of that, that so many women will actually support the
#
decision, you know, and that kind of complicates it.
#
Many women will actually support the decision. Yeah, that's right. Because if you're quite
#
right, it's playing into religious sentiments. And actually, that reminds me of something
#
that you mentioned that I wanted to go back to when you said that what do you do with
#
this anger? So that is also why, you know, because there is so much anger at the discrimination,
#
continuous discrimination that you face. Also, why you see this phenomenon that everybody
#
talks about where they say, why is the mother-in-law harassing the daughter-in-law? Because once
#
she gets some power, who is she going to take it out on, except the most vulnerable person?
#
And you know, putting aside the fact that she has lived through this herself, she'll
#
take it out on the daughter-in-law. And that is where it comes from. But I don't know,
#
it's it's a bit tragic that but yeah, you're right about Roe versus Wade. I mean, the overturning
#
of Roe is it's just something that seems so unlikely to happen in this day and age, right?
#
And with the majority of judges saying, up turning it. But I read a very, very interesting
#
piece in The New Yorker, which talked about how in the US, at least much of abortion is
#
today medical abortion through pills that you can take. And raising the question about
#
whether this will impact that or not. And that what will happen is that the surveillance
#
state will now become much stronger because the medical data, your medical prescriptions,
#
what you're buying, etc, etc, those are trackable. So they can track if you're buying these medicines.
#
And there are some possibilities for women to go into the next state and purchase them.
#
But even now, they're putting in place things which can also track that. So it not only
#
impacts, it's not only about the woman's control over her own body, but it is also about her
#
life. Because you're making the assumption that she has to carry that fetus to term,
#
she has to give birth to it. She has to look after it, she has to have the money to look
#
after it. She has to put aside the next 20, 25 years of her life. And you're making a
#
decision on that without taking the woman into account. I find that really, it's really
#
shocking and disgusting. And I hope that things like that don't rub off in this country. But
#
I mean, that, you know, like you said that you didn't expect it to happen. And neither
#
did I. Because, you know, one is sort of imagines that the longer arc of history goes towards
#
justice or freedom or whatever, but it goes towards a better place. And there might be
#
ebbs and flows, there might be the rise of authoritarianism in some countries. But overall,
#
it's fine. The battles we've won, they're not going to suddenly be turned back. Do you
#
have that same sort of optimism? And I have had different guests on this show, expressing,
#
you know, different views on this. So I think by and large, they're optimistic on the long
#
arc. But what's your sense of this? Like, does it make you reconsider whether the long
#
arc may actually be going towards a good place? Or were we constructing a long arc based on
#
I think a bit of both. I wouldn't say that we were constructing a long arc based on a
#
small sample size. I would say that we were constructing a long arc based on hope. And
#
I think hope is much more widespread than we kind of acknowledge. So if you are just
#
looking at women's rights and legislation on women, et cetera, and if you look at the
#
long arc, I think that the ways in which there has been marked improvement in legislation,
#
and you can argue that it's not implemented on the ground, all of that is true. But this
#
improvement, which has come about not on its own, not with the state suddenly saying how
#
we'll do good laws, et cetera, but through women and women's movements pushing for it,
#
it's beneficial to a much wider group than the group that's pushing for it. So it's unlikely
#
to go back. At least that's the hope that we start with, and unlikely to face opposition.
#
If it didn't face opposition when it was happening, it's not likely to. I mean, if you take a
#
concrete example, if you look at the 1992 constitutional amendments on Panchayati Raj
#
and the reservation of seats for women, there wasn't much hope when it happened. There was
#
a lot of skepticism, but there wasn't huge opposition either, because nobody thought,
#
especially our politicians, that it was in any way significant because it applied to
#
poor women, village women. So as long as it's not coming in parliament, what are they bothered
#
about? But actually, it has been one of the most significant changes. And from a 33% reservation
#
we are now up to 50% in many places. We have nearly half the elected posts now with women.
#
So 1.4 million out of three or something. And everywhere, I mean, not everywhere, but
#
let's say even if half of that, there's skepticism that they are Panchayat patties and all of
#
that. And that's not untrue. There'll always be some falsification and some thing going
#
wrong with any change. But the other half have done fantastic work.
#
So in many ways, it's tough to kill that hope. And I have always held that where women's
#
rights are concerned, it's going to be difficult for us to move back in this country, that
#
maybe we won't go ahead too much. But to go back will be difficult. But now I don't know,
#
you know, if you can have something like Roe and Wade going back so much, maybe it's these
#
kind of things can also happen here. So it's difficult to know whether to be hopeful of
#
that long arc. But actually, it's also not possible to be anything else. You have to
#
at least retain some of that hope and see if things shape up that way.
#
Let's go back to an earlier point in the long arc as it were, the long arc of this conversation
#
and continue talking about your life. Tell me, let's sort of go back to your childhood
#
and tell me about sort of the other influences that shaped you in the sense that today we
#
assume that you have the internet available to you, all the knowledge in the world is
#
available to you, you can do whatever, watch whatever, read whatever, listen to whatever.
#
And that of course wasn't the case. And often, you know, for people of my vintage or older,
#
what you had was, you know, was going to shape you in some way, it was all that there was,
#
you know, you read whatever you could get your hands on, you watch whatever you could
#
watch, so on and so forth. So tell me a little bit about sort of growing up, you know, what
#
was the scene in terms of what were the books that were around that you were allowed to
#
read? In some place, I think you've described your family as an atheist Punjabi family.
#
So I'm fascinated by that as well, about, you know, because like 1950s is a pretty early
#
time for a family to be atheist and to identify as such. So I'd love to know more about that
#
as well. So tell me a bit about all of those influences, intellectual, artistic, what's
#
So religion was never a big thing in our house. And when I say atheist, I mean that I never
#
saw my mother or my father go into a religious institution, into a temple or into a Gurdwara,
#
yes, at some point, but not that much really. So we, you know, whenever Diwali or festivals
#
were celebrated, the puja part of it was didn't happen, because it just didn't happen, you
#
know, we didn't even know what the rituals were or anything like that. So it wasn't as
#
if my parents said we don't believe in God, but there was no God like ritual or God like
#
image or anybody floating around. We had, as people often do, a picture of Guru Nanak
#
and that was taken out whenever my grandmother came to live with us in Ambala, she lived
#
with us. And then when we moved to Delhi, she started this thing of living with each
#
of her sons for two or three months at a time.
#
So then we used to bring out the Guru Nanak picture and keep it there as a place for her
#
to pray. We still had, we had the Guru Granth Sahib in the house, but it was never read.
#
It was a book that was just kept away. And the only time I remember my father actually
#
praying or wanting to pray or anything like that was when he was going to gamble and he
#
wanted to win. So he would then go to the Gurdwara beforehand or something. And I remember
#
that once I went somewhere to speak, do a talk or something. And at the end of the talk,
#
they gave me this large wooden Ganesh flat at the back, which you could hang up on a
#
wall. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I thought I'll give it away to somebody.
#
And my dad said, what will you do with it? So he took it and he put it in the staircase,
#
stairwell of their house. And he said, no, every time I go to the club, no, I'll just
#
ask him to give me some money. So in a sense, there was a kind of healthy disrespect also.
#
But of course, when my parents passed away and my mom, my father died earlier than my
#
mom died about 10 years after that, we did have a religious ceremony, but we basically
#
had the Sikh ceremony because it's much the simplest one. And that's they had not expressed
#
any desire to not have any religious thing. So we did the basic thing for them. But we
#
also like subverted it. You know, I when my dad died, I was determined that like my brothers,
#
I would also light the fire under his body. And the pundit was very, you know, we took
#
him to the cremation ground and the ragi was there and the pundit was there and the pundit
#
was very upset. And he said, no, no, girls can't do it, etc. And I said to him, nothing
#
doing. You know, it's my father, not yours. I'm going to do it. So I did. And I actually
#
called my sister and my two sisters in law. And we all did it together with my two brothers.
#
And then the my nieces also came along after that. And I also insisted on carrying his
#
body, which again was did not go down very well. And but I decided that, you know, they
#
were my brothers, my cousins, but there was also a whole bunch of neighbors, many guys,
#
he didn't even like, you know, who the hell are they, you know, he didn't even get along
#
with him. So why should they do this? So that too was an interesting kind of battle. And
#
then when my mother passed away, you know, by that time, the family also knew. So nobody
#
in the family objected when the women actually carried her body to the cremation. So I forgot,
#
what is the question you asked about all like one was about atheism, but in general about
#
your influences, intellectual, artistic books, music films. Yeah. So no, it's why this atheism
#
track took me here. Influences. Well, as I said, I read a lot. The interesting thing
#
is, one of the influences for me was the flow of languages around us in the house, I became
#
very interested in languages in that time. So my parents spoke to each other in Punjabi.
#
They spoke to my grandmother in Punjabi. They spoke to us in Hindi and encouraged us to
#
also speak to each other in English. So we grew up in these three languages and later
#
in life, I learned to read Guru Mukhi and I learned to read it for some very strange
#
reason but I was really happy because it took me two days to learn the alphabet. And then
#
of course, because I knew the language, it was much, much easier to read. So one of the
#
things was growing up with these languages around us. Another interesting thing was sport.
#
My mum used to be a badminton player. She loved doing that. So when she could, she would
#
go off and play badminton in the club. My brothers played cricket and my sister and
#
I we played hockey. And so we all learned to be quite sporty, although I have to say
#
that I didn't retain the interest afterwards. I spent just got too involved in reading books.
#
And that was the other thing that my mother, because she was a teacher, she was a teacher
#
of English and our teachers in the schools encouraged us all to read. Now, were we forbidden
#
to read anything? Well, yes, to some extent, we were forbidden to read comics, not forbidden
#
but told, don't read too much of it. And we used to, of course, read them, you know, we
#
would steal torches and hide under our eyes and then read them. Parents and all knew that
#
we were doing that, but they didn't really stop us. I think one of the things that my
#
parents did was they decided from early on, and I don't know if this was my mother and
#
father together or just my mother, to trust their kids and never to say to them, you can't
#
do this, but just advise them and then let them take their own decisions. So we were,
#
for example, never told you can't smoke, you mustn't smoke. And the interesting thing is
#
none of us took up smoking. We were never told you can't smoke in front of your parents
#
if you want to, you know, and but since none of us ever smoked, it didn't matter. From
#
a young age, we were allowed to be quite independent and move around on our own. My parents didn't
#
ask to keep track of us because they didn't know how to. In any case, at that time, there
#
were no cell phones or anything. So we learned to travel outside, travel by bus, come back
#
home, you know, when it was dark, all of that without thinking that there was anything wrong
#
with it. We were always encouraged to bring our girlfriends, boyfriends, friends into
#
the house. We were always, you know, many of our friends grew up in our home. But my
#
mother would very clearly say to them, you're welcome to come here. You can spend as much
#
time as you like. You can eat here, drink here, sleep here, etc. But when you're eating,
#
I will not cook for you. You will go to the tandoor nearby and you will buy rotis and
#
dal and bring them. And then you can all eat and you'll wash your own buttons. So actually,
#
our friends loved it. They loved this kind of independence that they got. And when we
#
moved to Delhi in the 60s, we moved first to Nizamuddin and then to Jangpura. And our
#
house was filled with all our friends who just milled about and pretty much stayed there
#
all day. So that built very, very close friendships. And many of those people are, you know, part
#
of our lives today. And because we were quite close in age, the siblings, my sister, the
#
eldest is now three years older than me. I mean, now three, she's always been three years
#
older than me. So the difference between her and my younger brother is four years, six
#
years. Yeah. Six years. So we were quite close in age. We went to university together at
#
the same time. Reading wise, you know, one of the things I remember very much is that
#
we were fascinated by the story of this headless horseman. There was this comic and this story
#
and we were fascinated by it. We were really frightened by it. And we were convinced that
#
this horseman would come at night and kill us all or do something. So my mother, being
#
the clever lady that he was, said, you know, they get very frightened with lohe ki cheez.
#
So then we would all think when she was asleep, we would sneak off and get tala and chimta
#
and churi and karhai and whatnot and keep them by our bedside and make sure that the
#
headless horseman did not attack us at night. Of course, everybody knew what was going on.
#
So comics, we read a lot of books. I read a lot of, of course, all this Enid Blyton
#
and all that kind of stuff. But we also were provided with Chandamama and Hindi magazines
#
and books. And I grew up reading those. And I'm actually really grateful to my parents
#
for that because a lot of the time English predominates, you know, and you don't sort
#
of think of other languages. So even though we grew up with Hindi and Punjabi around us,
#
most of the reading would in the normal course have been in English. But because our parents
#
just, you know, made sure that these things were around, certainly I read them. My siblings
#
didn't as much. So of the four siblings, I am the one who's kind of most fluent in Hindi
#
and continues to read that today. But the others are absolutely fluent in speaking and
#
everything, but they don't read or write or anything. So those were the books that we
#
read early on. We read all the classics. My mother was a great admirer of Mahadevi Verma
#
and her poetry. And I remember her reciting Mahadevi Verma's poems to me when I was young.
#
And she used to have a beautiful book of hers, which I still have, of drawings, beautiful
#
sketches and poems. And I still remember being fascinated by it because it used to have the
#
drawing now as a publisher, you know, interested in paper and print and everything. I can see
#
what it was. But at that time it was quite fascinating that there would be one orange
#
page with an orange drawing on it and then the poem on the facing page, but in orange
#
on white and a transparent paper in between to preserve the drawings. It was quite a beautiful
#
book. So I preserved that. She often told us stories. So one of the stories she told
#
us a lot of and which I later then read much more of was the story of Heer Ranja. So we
#
became familiar with some of the Punjabi stories of Sasi Poonu, Heer Ranja, others. So these
#
were the kind of influences, I suppose, that we grew up with. There were many other things.
#
I think Nehru came to Umballa once and we all were lined up on the streets in our best
#
frocks to meet him. We were taught music and dance. I remember learning Kathak as a child.
#
And I still remember the dress we used to wear of green kurta with an orange bandi and
#
white silk churida and a little topi. And my mother was very interested herself in music
#
and theatre. She worked with Sheila Bhatia in some of Sheila Bhatia's plays and she studied
#
she used to play the sitar. So these influences were all around us, literature, music, movies.
#
We used to be allowed to go once a week to the cinemas in Umballa, Defence Cinema, Capital
#
Cinema to watch movies which were very very cheap and everybody knew us so we could easily
#
go there. So those are some of the things. There's many others which I suppose will return
#
when I start thinking about them.
#
You've brought many of my own little memories flooding back. I think the Headless Horseman
#
was from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. I think that's where the character
#
came from. Also I remember now in the early 80s when I was a young boy my parents were
#
subscribed to Chanda Mama in both Hindi and English because they wanted me to read both.
#
And unfortunately I have let them down by losing the Hindi habit but I keep telling
#
myself that I'm going to get back to it sometime. You mentioned friends flocking in and out
#
of your house. Friends are all the time. You still know many of them. And one of the themes
#
that has interested me in recent times is friendships in the sense that some of my guests
#
like I remember for example Abhinandan Sekri saying this that all his friends are friends
#
he made before 25 and he's had no new friends since then. And one can understand that because
#
they're the people you've grown up with. They're in your comfort zone. It is what it is. In
#
my case most of my dear friends are people I've made well into adulthood and they've
#
in a sense been enabled by what the internet did to us by allowing us to form communities
#
of choice you know which by earlier we were restricted to communities of circumstance
#
you know the geography where you are restricted to you to a certain group of people your sort
#
of where you are located on the social ladder can restrict you to a group of friends. But
#
now you can meet people with common niche interests that you might have and that no
#
one else you physically know might share with you and you can form friends based on shared
#
interests and shared values. And this is something that strikes me especially in modern times
#
where I hear this constant lament from people that you know my old friendships are fraying
#
because so and so is support so and so in the political arena and the WhatsApp groups
#
have become really ugly and you're having to look at everyone in a new way. So at one
#
level I sort of lament that there is an overall lack of rootedness I sometimes feel and that
#
goes back to not having childhood friends. So they're there on Facebook but I've never
#
really had friends who've lasted from that period. Whereas at the same time it is a blessing
#
to be able to have friends with whom you have those shared connections of shared values
#
or shared interests and so on and so forth. So what are sort of your thoughts on this
#
through your journey in terms of just the way friendships develop and relationships
#
develop and so on. See our friendships or my friendships really started to develop after
#
we moved to Delhi because when we left Ambala behind and we were children then you know
#
so we don't I mean there are people we knew then who we are still in touch with today.
#
Not too many of them but some of them for example there was a family who lived next
#
door to us of several brothers called the Sens and they had two brothers twins who were
#
called Lal Neel and oddly enough Lal had a blue mark on his neck which is how we always
#
knew the difference and suddenly they resurfaced in our lives somewhere recently. So on and
#
off we are in touch with them but at that time pre Delhi times the social circle really
#
was family and cousins a lot of cousins and you know all the marriages of my aunts and
#
uncles that were taking place in our house. So my mama got married my mother's younger
#
brother got married in our house then my one of my chachas got married in our house then
#
another chacha then we traveled for another so it was like they were all in their 20s
#
or 30s so they were all getting married and because my dad was the eldest brother so it
#
became his responsibility to do that and there were a lot of cousins and we used to meet
#
a lot and all summer vacations were taken up with cousins. My uncle was stationed in
#
Dehradun he was in the army so we used to every summer vacation was in Dehradun my mama
#
was in Srinagar so then we would go to Kashmir and that kind of thing. Friendship started
#
forming when we moved to Delhi in school and then university and many of those friends
#
stay even though for example me I'm not on Facebook I have never been and I'm not very
#
much on social media so those possibilities of forming communities and everything which
#
are very real I think those are things that have never opened up for me but old friends
#
have been around and I'm still very much in touch with my school friends in fact just
#
the yesterday or day before I was talking to a friend she and I were at school together
#
and my brother and sister-in-law are now visiting her in Austria so they were sending me lots
#
of pictures and things from there of them sitting together and talking but we have remained
#
in touch for the longest time but where friendships are concerned one of the things that has been
#
most meaningful actually for me is the kind of friendships that we have formed inside
#
The whole sort of involvement in women's activism and in feminism has been built on a base of
#
female friendships which you know often as women of my generation came into feminism
#
and activism we began questioning the ways in which we had accepted a lot of patriarchal
#
privilege in our friendships and relationships with our men friends and we began to find
#
spaces in female friendships I make it sound like an academic thing but it isn't academic
#
I mean it's it was very real but in trying to find a few words in which to express it
#
I'm making it sound like an academic would write it in a book but anyway we began to
#
find these spaces which were very intimate spaces which were spaces or which were spaces
#
of great intimacy where we could share everything and anything about our lives and we knew that
#
there would be no betrayal that there would be trust and that was an amazingly empowering
#
and enabling thing you know just to know it is exactly what you're talking about finding
#
communities of choice it was our community and that community was built on female friendships
#
and I remember one of my friends in Sri Lanka talking very movingly about this and when
#
she was talking I thought yeah this is what we have also lived through although in a different
#
way she was talking about the war and the conflict and how that had divided people along
#
different identities Sinhala Muslim Tamil etc and how the women who had been together
#
in feminist activism had created another kind of subtext in this where they refused to
#
give in to the identity divisions or they tried to refuse it's not that they always
#
succeeded because those divisions have a way of overriding other things but they also would
#
for example if somebody wanted to attend a meeting and she was a Tamil woman wanting
#
to go to a meeting her Sinhala friend would take care of her children you know that kind
#
of thing so they provided solidarity to each other in this very very difficult circumstance
#
and when we heard that those stories they were really important for us.
#
There is another story that I often find very very inspiring it's a story of this woman
#
called Sharifa Khanam she comes from Tamil Nadu as her name says she's a Muslim woman
#
from Tamil Nadu she was living and working in Delhi in the late 80s and she had Tamil
#
English and Hindi because she was working in Delhi and then she got asked to come to
#
a women's conference that we had in Patna where she was asked to work as a translator
#
to translate things that women were talking about especially for women from Tamil Nadu
#
who were there and when she came to that conference one of the things that surprised her was that
#
she sat in this meeting where women were together from different parts of India and they were
#
sharing their lives they were talking about their most you know daily issues intimate
#
issues issues to do with domestic violence etc etc and she was shocked and she felt that
#
this is something that we have always been told is private and here are these women talking
#
about it in public although even although that public is a controlled public and that
#
inspired her to go back home to Tamil Nadu and to start to set up a women's Jamaat which
#
she then did and which today has grown to a huge organization with thousands and thousands
#
of members but when you see those women sitting together and debating on a case of domestic
#
violence or something else and trying to reach a resolution of that case what shines through
#
those interactions is the friendship that they have.
#
You know there is a way in which they ease with each other they are laughing and joking
#
and cracking joke in jokes that all of them know and and yet being empathetic and all
#
of that and that I think is what one of the most precious things that the women's movement
#
has given to all of us certainly to people like me so when you say friendship to me I
#
cannot separate it from that so it's not to say that one doesn't have male friends I have
#
many very good friends and friends I've known for the longest time and we are able to talk
#
about everything under the sun and be vulnerable with each other but somehow these kind of
#
friendships have a different meaning altogether because they are not only personal they're
#
You know what you said about Sri Lanka where you know a Tamil woman will go out to a meeting
#
and her Sinhala friend will look after her kids and all of that very moving and this
#
leads me to something that I've sort of spoken about with different people in different episodes
#
the economist Shruti Kapila at one point was talking about you know why don't you know
#
was wondering why don't women mobilize themselves as a voting block it would be so powerful
#
it's half the people and women's issues surely should be the most important issues for them
#
so why don't they do it and I also had an episode with the journalist Rukmini S who
#
you know looked at all the data across the country voting data election data and all
#
that and her conclusion was that women do not vote as a block anywhere they are voting
#
alongside whatever other you know margins people vote at but it's not as a block of
#
women and it strikes me therefore that the ways in which people vote at least as far
#
as it comes to identity you know that there are shifting sands and I wonder if some of
#
those appeals are stronger than the others for example there was a time where you could
#
argue that the electorate was pretty mandalized and everything was on the basis of caste and
#
so on what the BJP manages to have done is consolidated a lot of the Hindu votes and
#
obviously not even perhaps a majority of them but enough to bring them to power comfortably
#
where people across cast lines are voting more and more for the BJP and that's a Hindu
#
vote so it's on the identity there is that Hindu identity rather than say a caste identity
#
and so on though I mean caste identities of course play into it because they've appealed
#
to you know non-Jatav Dalits by saying the Jatavs are oppressing you and non-Yadav OBCs
#
by saying the Yadavs get all the spoils and all of that so there are these constant shifting
#
sands of identity and what matters to you at a particular time and all of that do you
#
see a realistic hope for a time where enough women can just say ki bahut ho gaya you know
#
women's issues matter we are going to go with whoever you know speaks to us the best and
#
you know and that becomes something to lines to mobilize along because after all half the
#
people in this country are women so what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
You know this is I think this is not a subject on which I can speak with any expertise or
#
knowledge but if you look at the last election and you look at the studies done by Pranoy
#
Roy and others NDTV studies that they will clearly indicate this very interesting trend
#
and that's visible also that women voters are now not voting with their families or
#
communities but are voting for the development agenda to some I put it in quotes because
#
I don't know what else to call it but they're voting for people they see as giving them
#
what they need infrastructure perhaps you know gas cylinders even though they cost money
#
after number one but nevertheless and also that the women's vote and the percentage of
#
women who are voting is increasing all the time.
#
So I think there is a way in which women's political awareness is certainly changing
#
and stepping outside of the family fold a little bit but whether there will be a time
#
when women will be will look at a woman candidate who is taking up women's issues and give
#
her the vote I think that will take a lot more doing because if you mean how can we
#
judge these things we can speculate or we can I suppose look at what we have in front
#
of us as a little bit of evidence so if you look at the again what's happening in the
#
panchayats there you can say okay we can see some signals that if a woman does well and
#
if she shows herself to be competent and if she is looking at issues that matter to women
#
because I don't think many of those women who are fighting panchayat elections would
#
go and say I will focus only on women's issues because they also know what this power structure
#
is like but in a sense by saying we'll look at you know the pds distribution and the fair
#
price shop and we look at the sanitation and we look at the community center and we look
#
at the school and you would they are looking at things that impact deeply impact the lives
#
of women so I think in some ways women are making those kinds of choices and perhaps
#
we can extrapolate from that to say that if this were to happen at a larger scale maybe
#
they would choose that person but again the other thing is that that person has to be
#
seen to be powerful and able to make those change or that change or that party has to
#
be seen to be powerful and able to make those changes so no matter how much the congress
#
party today suppose they suddenly adopt a women's agenda from tomorrow it's not going
#
to swing the women's vote their way because women will also see that you know where's
#
the power where are these resources to actually implement all this is this just intentionality
#
or is it just rhetoric what is it so in that sense also I think it's going to be tough
#
unless you can get somebody who can do that to some extent when Mayawati came in the first
#
time you know she was able to reach out in that way because people did believe what she
#
said because she came from the community she was talking about and so did women believe
#
what she said but I haven't seen a strong female figure after Indira Gandhi who wasn't
#
particularly bothered about women anyway I'm really you know I'll go down another track
#
which I visit often in my episodes and I think a lot about you mentioned about how you know
#
if a particular party was to promise a deliverance to women women would still be skeptical because
#
it would be like where is the power and all of that and I think one reason not just women
#
but everyone is skeptical of politics delivering anything is because the core consideration
#
is that look if our society is like this what is politics going to do politics after all
#
is supply responding to demand and the one question that I have been grappling with for
#
a long time is that when I grew up in my elite English-speaking bubble and all of that one
#
imagined that the world was you know secular and tolerant and liberal and all of those
#
things and everything else was an aberration and so on and so forth and one of the realizations
#
I've had over a lot of reading and going out there and recording episodes with people like
#
Akshay Mukul who wrote the great book on the Geeta Press one of the realizations that I've
#
had is that our society was always this way it was always bigoted and misogynist and all
#
of these things and that what is happening now is that politics in a sense has caught
#
up with society that it is not as if the toxic politics that we see now is driving society
#
in a particular direction though of course now we are perhaps in some sort of vicious
#
circle but that our society was always like this and therefore it is you know anybody
#
would then look at politics with skepticism because their sense would be that you know
#
if society is so deeply patriarchal for example you know what does a politician promising
#
mean you know what does a politician promising something mean anyway and we've kind of I
#
think seen over the decades like the big lesson that liberals should have learnt is that top
#
down interventions don't work that in this case Gandhiji was right that we need to change
#
society from the bottom up if you want to make society liberal so I want to ask you
#
your sense of this because one way of looking at Indian society is what I just articulated
#
that if on the margins of gender and caste and so many other things we are a deeply illiberal
#
society always have been another way would be to say that you know whatever you say of
#
India the opposite is also true and therefore you know we are also liberal in terms of the
#
way that we assimilate everything if you look at our culture and our languages and our cuisines
#
and all that we just naturally taken influences from everywhere but I tend to be more on the
#
pessimistic side these days so what is your thought of this because when you sort of look
#
back at society through the decades as you've experienced it do you think that this was
#
always dormant and it was waiting to find expression and that's happened today and perhaps
#
been amplified today but that it was always there or do you feel that that that know that
#
this is a disturbing development and this is something that has come up in modern times
#
and society once upon a time was a nicer gentler place so I really don't know so what's what's
#
your what's your take on this this is the kind of question you should be asking Pratap
#
Bhanu and he'll give you a very erudite knowledgeable answer to it no I have and I've had a long
#
episode with him but you've got more lived experience than him right because you because
#
you're just from being older and also from being someone who hasn't worked in an air
#
conditioned office all her life but you've gone out there and been out there so you know
#
that makes you the perfect person to ask in fact no look I I think both things are if
#
possible simultaneously true but I'm not saying I'm not saying what you said one way to go
#
down this road is to say whatever you say the opposite is always true yeah sure it
#
is but big deal you know we can keep saying that so but I do think that both things are
#
true I think that there is a way in which in our society the seeds of both discrimination
#
and violence have always been there so you know even if you put gender aside even if
#
you put religion aside something like caste how could it have the resilience that it does
#
if it hadn't been for the deep hatred and internalized casteism that we all have inside
#
us even though we like to think we are very liberal so you know when I'm teaching my
#
classes for example sometimes I and the sessions we do on caste I often bring in Dalit speaker
#
and basically I just ask them to talk about their lives and it's something that my young
#
students have never even considered but when you talk to them they will say no but we are
#
not casteist and then you start opening up that experience and start questioning them
#
about it they will say oh yes you know now we realize that the woman who comes to work
#
in our house she drinks out of a different cup so suddenly those things start to become
#
visible which you have taken as normal which is the same thing with gender discrimination
#
you know when people start to articulate it that's when you actually also start to see
#
it so I think that these things have always been there in our society I don't I mean I
#
don't think the image of India as a non-violent nation is actually true and yet I would say
#
that if you look back at let's say history in as we know it you look back maybe 200 years
#
maybe more who knows if these things were so deep we would have all been killing each
#
other constantly all the time so what is it that what's the glue that holds these communities
#
together in some kind of social contract that recognizes that there is deep discrimination
#
it's very misogynist it's very caste it's it's very you know full of prejudice full
#
of anger and yet there's something that keeps people from being continually violent towards
#
each other so this was a question I I was also faced with when I was working on partition
#
that when you look at Hindu Muslim society if you just look at the Punjab the Punjabi
#
Hindu and the Punjabi Sikh was extremely wealthy better off occupied all the sort of top professions
#
teaching or all kinds of things whereas the Muslim was a peasant the landless laborer
#
deeply indebted perhaps the most indebted peasant in India and also subjected to the
#
kind of discriminatory treatment so you have the conditions for an outbreak of violence
#
right there and if it happens nobody's going to be surprised by it and yet you don't see
#
it until such time or you don't see it in any great measure until such time as the British
#
start kind of stoking it so I am not sure what the answer is is it that people continue
#
to live with with inequality and discrimination and don't really protest about it until something
#
catalyzes that protest but if I try to bring that knowledge to bear on the women's movement
#
I don't see that happening over there yes women continue to live with discrimination
#
etc. but in the in this century and in the past century so if you take it from the 70s
#
until now when you have seen feminist activism it hasn't come out of a context of anybody
#
uxawing the women but it has come out of a context of women themselves actually realizing
#
post independence how the promises of independence to them are not being fulfilled and that is
#
driving them to fight for the change that they want that you might say that the difference
#
is that that is not violence that is protest and resistance whereas in other cases you
#
have violence against the other community and that could be a possible kind of explanation
#
but I also don't think that even though you know Akshay talks about the Hindi public sphere
#
and that study of the Gita press talks so evocatively about the ways in which that forms
#
a base for what we call Hindutva today I still feel that the what we perhaps misname as secularism
#
and maybe we need to see it as respect acceptance tolerance of other religions I still think
#
that that is a very deep characteristic of this society but I don't have an adequate
#
explanation for how these two things exist together what I've actually failed to understand
#
and I don't know if the Pratap or people like that can explain it or even if Akshay can
#
explain it is this deep sense of feeling victimized by the Hindus you know where does that come
#
from I can't see the logic of it at all and I don't know there was you know RWAs these
#
days these resident welfare associations they are hotbeds of this kind of whatsapp messages
#
passing on so there was a whatsapp message on our RWA the other day which said mosques
#
get this much allowance rupees xyz per I can't remember per day churches get so much and
#
temples get so much and it looked like temples get half of what mosques get and then there
#
was a little text next to it saying all the you know predictable things so I just read
#
it and usually I don't respond to these things then I just responded saying you know this
#
is not a forum where we should be putting these things out and we should be careful
#
about all of this then I got some mail back saying yes but the truth is the truth so I
#
just put another line saying you know even if this were true which I doubt because you
#
provided no sources or anything but even if this were true why blame the Muslims for it
#
if you as Hindus are feeling discriminated against for getting less money why not fight
#
for it and ask your ask the state because it's the states that's decided no it's not
#
the Muslims and I put a thing saying you know we women don't have many rights in India we
#
don't blame you guys but we fight for our rights so that lit some kind of flame or something
#
but anyway finally it quietened down the discussion but then one of my neighbors put in saying
#
yeah we shouldn't be having this discussion on this channel but the fact is that we Hindus
#
we have been discriminated against and we have not been given the same concessions I
#
thought what are they talking about you know you hear the Hindu guys saying oh Muslims
#
have four wives is that even a thing to talk about I mean can you even talk about it with
#
any kind of face like how can you say I also want four wives it's really weird so I don't
#
know if these are deep characteristics of our society I like to think that we are much
#
more accepting we are much more you know the with other religion and other customs and
#
so on even though of course the separation in the personal and all of that is really
#
quite horrific so but still you know we have up till now been at least modern India been
#
a relatively relatively peaceful society something must be there to explain that I don't know
#
what it is one of the things I pride myself for is having a good bullshit detector when
#
it comes to Hindu propaganda so I can guarantee you that that mosques temples sing is obviously
#
made up it's made up because one of the neighbors immediately put a thing and we showed it was
#
exactly equal to everybody you know I had a conversation with a friend a few years ago
#
which really disturbed me because he was a well-educated English-speaking friend with
#
an MBA degree and all of that absolute hardcore corporate types and he one day told me that
#
you know the Muslim birth replacement rate is nine or something some ridiculous figure
#
and I was like wait a minute just take a step back and think of the figure like nine it's
#
not even like you know and I happen to know the figures so I told him the figures and
#
I explained that Muslims are slightly more because poor people tend to have more kids
#
and so on and so forth but it's incredible that there is not only like you know if it
#
was such an outlandish figure about some other thing say soul of the sale of dosas versus
#
biriyanis you know he would put his critical cap on and analyze it but because it is something
#
that is in line with existing prejudices toh kuch bhi chalega I have a question which I
#
think is sort of I was saving for later but seems apt to this as well to the subject that
#
you mentioned as well which is that you've pointed out you know in your I think introduction
#
to other side of silence and elsewhere that there wasn't at one time as much of partition
#
studies as you would have liked that you know people sometimes treated it as something that
#
has happened in the past or people would sort of say ki theek hai wo toh ho gaya abhi kya
#
zarurat hai you know let it be and whereas people like you and others correctly felt
#
that no need to do more of it and I was wondering that is that also a part of sort of denial
#
that a reason to not look back at partition is because it reveals something about a human
#
nature and b our society itself and we would prefer to be in denial of it because those
#
are truths you give it a trigger you light the right match and you could have that kind
#
of violence and that kind of crime all over again and I wonder if that denial kind of
#
plays into it like when we speak about why have we been such a sort of peaceful society
#
relative to what could have happened one of my answers is just inertia you know that
#
inertia and like I'm half bonk so at least from that part of my heritage I can say laziness
#
but you know that that's one of the answers but what if the core truth about human nature
#
and about our society is something uglier and that's part of what stops us from looking
#
at partition we don't want to see that because we're looking in the mirror I love this idea
#
of inertia actually it's quite interesting so no you're so right about that actually
#
I think one of the things that about India that I strongly feel is that as a nation as
#
a people we are totally unwilling to confront unpleasant truths about our past and even
#
our present we kind of wish them away we think let it be and that has been I think one of
#
the reasons why for example with partition we've been so reluctant to confront it to
#
talk about it in ways that might open up things that we don't want to see so in a sense if
#
you look at the Holocaust you see that you can easily pinpoint the Nazis and the fact
#
that they are the ones who perpetrated the violence on the Jews so there is a perpetrator
#
and there's a victim here there isn't everybody killed people participated in the making of
#
you know violent instruments or also I mean even my father's friends told us how they
#
made those bombs inside what a lot of things in their flat cocktails in their flats and
#
so on so in a sense to confront that past would be like saying that we have to come
#
up against ourselves we have to see our own complicity we have to see where we went wrong
#
why we went wrong we have to admit it and it's not easy it's always easier to put the
#
blame on the others so even when figures are traded the figures of offense are more lodged
#
at Pakistan's door than they are at our door and I remember that when you know in the early
#
days when my work on partition was published there were two scholars working with the Center
#
for the Study of Developing Societies who wrote a piece in seminar I think it was which
#
basically critiqued my book which is fine but took the argument that you know why rake
#
up all this now it's done it's finished put it under the carpet and forget it and we do
#
say that a lot of the time in India you know and you think that as long as something is
#
in the past it'll go away but as history shows again and again it doesn't go away for those
#
people who have been at the receiving end of this violence that memory is not something
#
that they can easily wish away that sense of hurt and being wounded and being betrayed
#
is not something that can easily vanish and it doesn't vanish with time and it doesn't
#
vanish even with death because in a sense it gets passed on and passed on through generations
#
to families and others so why is it that we are unable and unwilling to deal with it and
#
I don't have an answer to that but I think there is a certain kind of maturity that nations
#
require to deal with traumatic pasts where you have to admit your own culpability and
#
I think for all our openness and welcoming of knowledge from all over the world and all
#
of that we've always had this thing that India has a lot to give to the world but we don't
#
have that much to learn from it you know we have our tradition we have our this we have
#
our that and the world can learn so much from us but we also need to learn from the world
#
and we don't actually acknowledge that at all.
#
So in a way people's histories people's traumas especially at the time of the making of the
#
nation they have remained untalked of.
#
In other countries you might actually have much much larger research projects that try
#
to document memory that try to archive memory that try to create a record of that time so
#
that we know what happened so that we in some ways acknowledge that it happened to our own
#
people and it was done often by our own people but also that in some ways we learn from it
#
so that it's never repeated.
#
That humility we don't actually have and I remember that when I was first when I first
#
discovered the extent of family violence towards their own women and children during partition
#
I was really surprised at how this thing had kind of just been in the realm of silence
#
nobody had talked about it and yet it was something that everybody knew and why didn't
#
we talked about talk about it because it's so much easier to dress it up as honour killing
#
so much more difficult to talk about it as murder which is was and as murder in of our
#
own people by our own people but I think that kind of honesty is really needed I mean discussions
#
about partition even to this day despite the fact that so much work has been done by so
#
many scholars that has opened up innumerable areas which were not apparent to us before
#
so much work has been done and yet you will never see an open discussion on television
#
talking about culpability talking about violence you'll never see that.
#
What's the fear but there is a fear I don't know what it is but it's there.
#
As we contemplate the fear I have no doubt you're right now feeling the fear of having
#
to go on and on talking with me let's take a quick commercial break and on the other
#
side of the break we'll sort of continue down your personal journey and take delightful
#
digressions as and when they present themselves.
#
Long before I was a podcaster I was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first
#
heard of me because of my blog India Uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and
#
became somewhat popular at the time I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I
#
was shaped by it in many ways I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to
#
think about many different things because I wrote about many different things well that
#
phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now I'm
#
doing it through a newsletter I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe it is free once you sign up each new installment that I write will land
#
up in your email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India
#
Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com thank you welcome back to the scene in the
#
on scene I'm chatting with Urvashi Bhutalia on her fascinating life and journey and thoughts
#
and you know we sort of covered your early childhood from you know Ambala to Delhi and
#
so on and so forth and tell me now about what happens when you start going to college like
#
you did a BA in literature from Miranda House in 71 you did two masters from DU in 73 and
#
then a South Asian studies in 77 so tell me a bit about sort of the environment of college
#
and what were you like at this point in time what was your sense of yourself as in terms
#
of you know what do you want to go ahead and do and you know what does life look like to
#
you at that vantage point?
#
You know at the time that I went to college I joined Miranda House in I think it was the
#
end of 68 yeah probably around then to do my master to do a BA in English now in a sense
#
I had always wanted to study literature because I loved books and literature and reading but
#
also in a way at that time in Delhi University there were not that many options open to you
#
if you wanted to be in the humanities social sciences we didn't have that many courses
#
and I hadn't yet fallen in love with history so literature was the option and that's what
#
The university at that time it was very important to be on the campus because the campus was
#
a place where a lot of student activity happened the police were not allowed into the campus
#
at that time it was our protected area and all the universities across India I guess
#
but Delhi University because I was there I remember very well that the kind of winds
#
of political unrest from across India were touching us all the time we heard of things
#
we read about them there was theatre and discussions and all kinds of things and in the 70s many
#
of our colleagues actually were very inspired by the Naxal Naxalite movement and several
#
of them when left college and joined the movement and went underground people like me never
#
had the courage to do that and never also had the wish to do that because although we
#
found the discussions and things exciting but I think we weren't that deeply drawn into
#
It was also a time when we were as young women in the university coming to a realization
#
of issues to do with feminism so in one way many of us because we were widely read we
#
had read a lot of feminist literature coming from the west there wasn't that much available
#
in India at that time but in another way we were involved in issues to do with women in
#
the university, hostile conditions, the fact that women had to come back early, buses so
#
we fought to get special buses for women because first we fought to get special buses for students
#
and then we found that those were fully occupied by these guys who would come early and you
#
know block three seats like Mushtandas and not let anybody sit there then when we came
#
in we would have to ask their permission so we fought to get special buses for women so
#
we were involved in you know these issues in some ways.
#
In Miranda House which was actually for me when we were choosing which colleges to apply
#
for admission to I my only choice was Miranda House I didn't apply anywhere else and it
#
I had made that choice quite consciously partly it was because my mother was there although
#
she never studied there she as I explained she lived in the hostel but partly it was
#
because Miranda wasn't such an elite college it was a college that had a profile of students
#
from across class and caste and it was also a college that offered science courses and
#
did not kind of play into the stereotype that women must only study certain kinds of subjects
#
home science or literature or even though I did study literature.
#
We were lucky enough to have some fantastic teachers who were quite young people not all
#
of them were young but some of them who were close in age to us you know having graduated
#
a few years ago and everything and they inspired us to do research to take part in theatre
#
to do lots of things but we were also fortunate to have some teachers who were older and who
#
were like icons in the university so my one of my tutors one of my favorite teachers and
#
when I did my masters she became my tutor was a woman called Mrs. Krishna who was like
#
a legend to us because she had married three times and the third husband was a Russian
#
called Isaulov and they together had a son called Vladimir and all of us were in love
#
with Vladimir although we had never met him we'd never seen him or anything she had a
#
picture of him hanging in the house and we all decided we were going to marry Vladimir
#
so there was Mrs. Krishna and she became my tutor and I still remember that she made me
#
write a paper and she made me rewrite it almost ten times because the first time I handed
#
it to her she threw it back at me and said it's rubbish go back and rewrite it and by
#
the time I wrote it for the ninth or tenth time I was in tears and then I gave it to
#
her and she said to me now this is a gem and don't ever forget that you must write from
#
the heart and I have never forgotten that lesson actually for me it was my really important
#
lesson in how to write.
#
Do you still have that paper?
#
No no all I remember is it was on Troilus and Cressida so that much I know but I don't
#
have it how would one preserve something from that time?
#
So there was all this political stuff going on and we were participating in discussions
#
and everything Miranda House was one of the most political colleges of all we and yet
#
it used to do some strange things for example it had a beauty contest for freshers so when
#
I joined we all had to dress up and walk the ramp in high heels that meant walking the
#
rickety old Miranda House stage and be judged by a group of people and we hadn't yet come
#
into feminism in ways that were to manifest themselves later so I remember that the first
#
year we didn't protest about it at all but over time we began to realize what was happening
#
and we began to protest about the beauty competition we also became the first women's college to
#
join the Delhi University Students Union because the Delhi University Students Union was seen
#
as within quotes dirty and political and it was dominated by men but it wasn't yet such
#
a political party dominated thing it did have that but it still had people who were not
#
necessarily you know put up by political parties but we felt very strongly in Miranda House
#
that why should we stay out of this union because the university is our space and this
#
union is our space and so we joined it facing a lot of criticism but we did join it I also
#
became involved in college politics so in my first year of my master's degree I stood
#
for college president and won the election and then was able to try and implement some
#
things but I learned that college politics like politics anywhere can also be a hard
#
and somewhat unpleasant lesson and that that one year of being college president cured
#
me of the desire to be in politics forever so the university was an extremely vibrant
#
place and a place where a lot of things were buzzing there was a lot of ferment and we
#
were as young women coming into our feminism at that point and I finished my master's degree
#
in 73 and even before I had finished it went into a job with Oxford University Press and
#
that was to shape my future as a publisher in very very fundamental ways but it was also
#
the time that apart from Nakshabari and others there were a number of other very fascinating
#
interesting inspiring protest movements across India that touched us so they had been in
#
the 60s and the 70s in Maharashtra the Shahada movement which was a peasant movement and
#
many feminists were writing about it or and we you know got to read some of their work
#
there was the anti-price rise movement in Gujarat which was a movement thousands and
#
thousands of women came out on the streets to protest against rising prices of commodities
#
and they brought out their balans and their batons and their ladles and all of that.
#
There was the Bodh Gaya movement and some of the women we knew were involved in that
#
which was a movement of students inspired by Jayaprakash Narayan and students fighting
#
to recover land and for the implementation of land reform and so on so they managed to
#
seize about 5000 acres of land from the Bodh Gaya mutt and when it came to redistribution
#
of that land that's when the question came up of why the patta is only in the name of
#
men and why not in the name of women because women have also fought for this.
#
So all this was happening around that period there was Chipko also so we got to hear about
#
all of these things and it was very inspiring and it was what pushed us into the discussions
#
that led to us being becoming feminists really and in about 76 I think when I had been working
#
in Sweden University Press for a few years so that was also very interesting thing actually.
#
I knew by the time I had finished my master's degree that although I deeply loved literature
#
I did not want to have anything to do with it in terms of a career because it was only
#
English literature and the more I became involved in ground level grassroots type of work the
#
less relevant Spencer and Milton seemed to me and I was determined not to do that but
#
at that time the only career open to women who had studied literature was to become teachers
#
and because I was good at my subject my teachers thought I would become a teacher but I was
#
absolutely determined not to and it was pure chance that I had been studying French on
#
the side and for a very nefarious reason that the French Allianz Francis had a very handsome
#
teacher and all the young women were in love with him and we thought okay we'll get a chance
#
with this guy and then next door to the Allianz Francis was the only one of the few really
#
seedy restaurants come cafes in South Delhi called Shagufa where there were dark lights
#
and you know all of that and we used to be able to go there and meet up with the guys
#
and of course there was no place you could get a drink or anything like that Delhi was
#
very different the height of being subversive was to get a cup of chai or not even coffee
#
because coffee wasn't fashionable at that time.
#
So in my French class was a young woman who worked with the Oxford University Press as
#
a secretary and she said to me one day you know you're always grumbling about not wanting
#
to teach etc so why don't you come to OUP we have some freelance jobs that you can do.
#
So I went along and the freelance job was a very inglorious thing I was called a pester
#
upper and I basically had to paste names like Graham and Sita on top of names like John
#
and Mary to turn British textbooks into books that could be used in Indian schools and you
#
know it was a it was a great sort of skill was needed because Ram had only three letters
#
John had four so I had to paste it somewhere across so that there would be equal white
#
space on either side and I used to have to work with a glue called rubber solution which
#
is used for bicycle tires and I became very familiar with bicycle shops in Delhi.
#
So that was really fun and actually in Oxford University Press when I finished freelancing
#
they offered me a job as a trainee and they sent me the job was in book production with
#
the production manager who was a man called Adrian Bullock and they sent me to a printing
#
press and I completely fell in love with the printing press and I had carried this unsubstantiated
#
dream in my head of actually wanting to become a printer and of having a small platen press
#
which I would put on a table in my room and where I would print political pamphlets for
#
all my friends who were involved in different political campaigns of course their dream
#
never materialized but I got the next best thing and then I decided that publishing is
#
something that I truly love and where I want to stay all my life so the teaching career
#
was swiftly abandoned I remained in publishing I'm there till this day and I have not had
#
a day when I don't continue to be in love with the profession and with what I do over
#
there and alongside my work involvement in feminist groups materialized and I mean different
#
things started to happen we formed groups in Delhi we started to meet we started traveling
#
all over India seeing what other groups were doing we decided to start a magazine that
#
was a magazine Manushi which we actually started jointly together 18 of us and before it was
#
taken over by Madhu and we then decided to we formed a street theater group and we decided
#
to campaign against dowry and rape through in many different ways including through the
#
medium of street theater so we created a play called Om Swaha and later we created a play
#
called Dafa 370 or something I forget exactly the title and we took it around from place
#
to place performing and getting people's reactions and raising discussions but also holding
#
many many demonstrations along with other women's groups on issues to do with women
#
because by this time all of the country you know these issues were coming up in 1978 is
#
when the courts in delivered the Mathura judgment in the rape case of a young woman called Mathura
#
in Maharashtra and when four legal professors Upendra Bakshi, Vasudha Dagambar, Lotika Sarkar
#
and somebody called Kelkar wrote an open letter to the chief justice saying this is a travesty
#
of justice because this young woman was that the rapists were acquitted because she was
#
labeled a woman of bad character because she had had sex before so that open letter acted
#
as a catalyst for a nationwide movement against rape and we were all drawn into it we all
#
worked at it when I think back now I wonder how we communicated because we had no methods
#
of communication you know there were no cell phones there was no internet we did not even
#
have landlines if you had a landline phone you had to make a phone call to Bombay you
#
had to book a trunk call which cost the earth and if you needed to get through quickly and
#
quickly meant two three hours then you had to book what was called a lightning call which
#
cost like four times the more but we managed to do it somehow and build a campaign which
#
resulted in 83 in the changing the first ever change in the IPC on the issue of rape so
#
all of this was I mean this is a long journey but starting from college this is how it kind
#
of ended up in getting involved with women's issues and so on.
#
So I'll you know ask you in much more detail about your publishing career but first I'd
#
like to sort of talk about this growing feminism both in terms of your own feminism and in
#
terms of the feminist movement in India you know and one of the things I'm interested
#
in is that how did you sort of begin to develop frameworks to think about the subject like
#
it's one thing to have that instinctive sense of this is just and this is unjust and there's
#
another to actually build frameworks read books build a theory around it and so on and
#
so forth and apart from that how does that then that theory then interact with what is
#
on the ground like you pointed out that a lot of the feminist theory that was available
#
to you was from the West there was not so much quite at that time from India and you've
#
mentioned elsewhere that you know the history of Western feminism is one thing but it may
#
be a mistake to take that lens and look at Indian feminism through it right because then
#
you can you know make the in a sense that pester upper thing of putting Sita Geeta on
#
whatever can you know be a sort of a metaphor for that and later separately you've spoken
#
about how you know it might be okay to you know have absolute notions like agency is
#
always good but even there there are nuances that is agency always good when you know agency
#
can be used by women to demand or enforce violence against other women as you've put
#
it so all these nuances start creeping in when the real world collides with the frames
#
through which you look at the real world so I'd be very interested in learning about these
#
processes within you because what happens is and what I've seen in myself and in others
#
is that when you discover a framework the way of looking at the world initially you're
#
just infatuated you know that becomes a hammer for every nail and you're quick to pass judgment
#
using your framework and so on and so forth but later over time you understand that the
#
world is really complex and use you know you start sort of modifying the ways in which
#
you look at the world so tell me about you know how this process played out for you you
#
know I don't I wouldn't use the phrase that you use which is when the real world collides
#
with whatever it is that you have built up as a framework so I think in the early days
#
even though some of us who had the privilege of being educated and so on had read Western
#
feminism I think by and large we were all full of doubt about how those ideas of radical
#
feminism socialist feminism etc applied to us because even for example if you were to
#
take socialism in the Indian context it meant something quite different so while many of
#
us embraced the label of feminism we were a bit reluctant to embrace the other label
#
because we didn't quite know where we fit into them yet there were people who did that
#
it's not that everybody didn't do that the other thing is that we didn't begin with the
#
need for theories we began really by both noticing what was going on around us and reacting
#
to it so if you look at the map of feminist activity or women's activity in India at that
#
time you will see something like Chipko which you cannot label a feminist movement even
#
though it was led by women and so on and so forth and yet it's something that did deeply
#
influence the history of feminism in raising questions not necessarily consciously about
#
the relationship of woman with nature in raising questions about resources and women's work
#
fetching water becomes much more difficult when the forest is cut down and the water
#
level goes down all of these issues came into our consciousness through something like Chipko.
#
In the same way the Shahada movement not a feminist movement and yet dominated by women
#
and also focused around stories of sexual assault of tribal women taken from place to
#
place by a singer ballad singer called Amber Singh there were women at the heart of that
#
movement and they were kind of raising issues so for many of us who were in cities and who
#
were at a distance from these movements the questions were okay what is the nature of
#
work for women how do we deal with this question of peasants and their rights how do we deal
#
what are the battles that need to be fought over here how are they different from the
#
battles to do with the environment.
#
Then with the Mathura case rape became an issue but at that time we didn't there were
#
many things that we understood and many things that we didn't and the actions that we took
#
were based on the things that we understood and over the years the limitations of what
#
we understood became clear to us so in a sense our learnings get incorporated into the next
#
steps that we take as feminists but it's really important to see the history of that because
#
without a history it makes no sense at all.
#
So in a sense I think one we were very reluctant to bring in bring to bear on our work frames
#
that we knew didn't apply to them but we didn't have frames of our own or we didn't know how
#
to articulate them what we did have which we were very lucky with I think was the fact
#
that people who were active within the movement were cut across class and caste and were equally
#
academics let's say and activists and urban poor and rural activists and so on and so
#
forth so those perspectives never disappeared and I don't recall any academic trying to
#
impose a theory on us but we just had lots and lots of questions and those questions
#
continue to this day except that they have become much more nuanced as you have said
#
also much more complex.
#
So for example with the question of rape the initial demands that we made in changes in
#
the law one was in the definition of rape one was that we felt that the survivor's
#
name should never be revealed because she has she faces a lot of stigma and her past
#
sexual conduct should not be in question and so on.
#
Now this thing of her name should not be revealed because she faces a lot of stigma may have
#
made sense at that time it doesn't make that much sense today lot of women are saying why
#
should we be the ones who have to be silent you know we should not I mean we want to speak
#
about it we should be able to speak about it also the speaking about it somewhere touches
#
on the stigma and lessens it because if you can speak about it then it becomes within
#
the realm of the spoken and sometimes that that kind of helps it to become less stigmatized
#
we don't know but that that does happen.
#
So today we would argue for different things so when the 2013 amendments came what did
#
women argue for many other things they argued for a broadening of the definition but they
#
also argued for the victim or survivor being gender neutral because they said it's not
#
only women it's men and trans people you can say the perpetrator can be male maybe because
#
we don't yet have instances we don't know but they also argued for for example mass
#
rape which we had not taken into account because we had not seen sexual violence happening
#
in political conflict and not we had not seen it that doesn't mean that it didn't happen
#
it's just that we didn't we were not geared to looking at it but when we realized it it
#
became part of the whole thing army rape the question of marital rape so you see the trajectory
#
you see how the movement is growing changing understanding nuance understanding complexity
#
and therefore the actions activities demands all of that are becoming equally influenced
#
So at that time we were young we were innocent we were naive and we didn't have any frameworks
#
now I think we have some but I think that there is still in India not that distance
#
between theory and practice because for us in some ways what the women's movement has
#
tried to preserve is that theory cannot be divorced from practice there is no such thing
#
as a theoretical frame and an empirical reality it's nonsense to think like that because then
#
you are recreating the power equation and saying somebody has the right to make this
#
frame and someone else lives that reality that hasn't been part of this movement.
#
So tell me about sort of some of your early heroes within the movement like in other interviews
#
like earlier just now you mentioned Lothika Sarkar as part of one of the lawyers who kind
#
of wrote back to them in other interviews you mentioned people like Veena Mazumdar Leela
#
Dube Vimla Farooqi and so on and so forth so you know tell me a little bit about sort
#
of these early people and the impact that they had on you and the ways in which they
#
might have inspired you and how that sort of you know through this entire process you
#
know what was the sense of yourself developing like at what point like I guess you know you
#
realize literature wasn't for you when you got into publishing and fell in love with
#
publishing and all of that but in a sense your entire life has been from where the distant
#
vantage point from where I can see is really a sort of a crusade to make the world a better
#
place for women you know and essentially a feminist act so when did you like did you
#
just gradually grow into it without realizing it and finally this is who you were or you
#
know were there people who sort of inspired you and you could look at their lives and
#
say yes I want to be like that person.
#
There were a lot of women who were inspirational at that time these were all women of my mother's
#
generation who had taken part in the nationalist movement who had been part of Gandhi's campaigns
#
and because of whom we were able to be who we were so all the women that you have named
#
Veena Mazumdar for sure Veena was really quite special and she in heading not well in yeah
#
more or less pushing the committee on the status of women and their report on India
#
she produced something that really was like a catalyst for much of our activism subsequently
#
and you know unlike government reports usually where you don't have no respect for the people
#
who are doing it because they are often placed there by the state the group of women who
#
led this was really an independent thinking set of women and miraculously they could get
#
that report in into the government and into the public domain at that time almost by a
#
slate of hand because remember that this was the time of the emergency and so much political
#
activity was curtailed many of our friends were in jail it was a surprise to us we didn't
#
question it that Mrs Gandhi forgot about the report and just let it through but it strengthened
#
our hands quite a lot so for women who were able to achieve that kind of thing I think
#
that that you know they deserved our respect our politics like with every generation were
#
different from theirs I had a lot of differences with the way my mother's feminism built up
#
but that didn't mean that we didn't respect who they were and where they were coming from
#
and what we owed to them and I think that generational thing happens with every generation.
#
Now how did the involvement in feminism or women's activism and my publishing come together
#
in actually very organic kind of ways it's not that I left literature behind I love literature
#
I still read I would you know any day like to spend my time just reading but I found
#
that studying English literature was not where I wanted to be had Delhi University at that
#
time had courses which took in Indian Asian other literatures I have no doubt I would
#
have stayed on there but I was too involved in the politics of the women's activism in
#
India to feel the to live with the distance between what I was studying and what my life
#
was it is your you know you spoke about the frame and the thing it's it was a bit like
#
that the frame was completely alien and lovely though it was it had it bore no relationship
#
to my life and I tried for example at that time to move to studying sociology but you
#
weren't allowed to make those moves at that time so that's when I took up publishing and
#
of course I fell in love with publishing but then and to go back to something you said
#
as we got more involved in activism we also began to realize that we actually knew very
#
little about the issues we were dealing with we had no knowledge of them so opposing dowry
#
deaths and dowry in north India what did it mean I mean we knew vaguely that you know
#
the age that's about it but how did dowry take the form it had taken was it only actually
#
confined to Hindus was it only middle class was it rural did it cut across religions where
#
we knew nothing about this so being in publishing I began to look out for books that could help
#
us to understand at that time the only thing we had access to were books we had no google
#
auntie no internet no nothing no there was hardly anything I remember one pamphlet by
#
M.N. Srinivas and one book on dowry by two writers I think called Stanley and Tambaia
#
or something so I began to think and I spoke to my bosses and again this is very interesting
#
that the kind of what you have to confront or what you have to deal with at an everyday
#
level my bosses in the OUP were wonderful men really knowledgeable open thinking generous
#
I mean they taught me so much and they gave me every possible opportunity that could be
#
given to improve my knowledge other than climbing up the ladder of the job which they only reserved
#
for the men but when I talked to them about publishing books by women and about women
#
and they were befuddled and bewildered who what what do women write and who will read
#
and what are these books about and our women's issues even you know legitimate issues so
#
that is when I thought okay I'm going to do this myself and that's where the activism
#
and the publishing seamlessly came together to me it was a real stroke of luck because
#
where do you get a chance to lead your professional life and be politically committed and have
#
those two come together so I have always counted myself really lucky in in this regard and
#
really took some years of course for me to be able to do that and it was also there's
#
another motivation behind it which was that even though I completely loved my work and
#
the office and the men and the people I was working with but it became very clear to me
#
in three or four years that there would be no upward movement for me if I stayed on there
#
as there would be for my male contemporaries so I was watching all my male contemporaries
#
you know people like Tejeshwar Singh and others just going up the ladder and and I knew that
#
I was as competent perhaps more who knows as intelligent perhaps more who knows but
#
that this would never be a possibility so stepping out and starting something of your
#
own that was that also fitted in actually very nicely with that.
#
And the report you were referring to earlier is the Towards Equality report in 1974 and
#
you recite an anecdote about that elsewhere where you speak about how you know you learnt
#
an important lesson from the educational JP Naik who told you that it's not enough just
#
to have a report out that you have to hold a press conference while releasing the report
#
so that the world gets to know take control of the narrative and in general how important
#
a lesson do you think that this was that you can't just do the things that you want to
#
do but also think about you know building narratives around them and which becomes
#
an especially important question in this day and age where there are narrative battles
#
everywhere and therefore anybody who wants to do anything whether you like it or not
#
you have to think about sort of this aspect of it.
#
So you know what were your learnings there and in a larger sense I also and we'll come
#
back to your publishing because I want to go into detail in that but in a larger sense
#
when we look at the evolution of you know feminism in India you know you've spoken
#
elsewhere again about how you know it evolved from street level activism to building institutions
#
at the same time I'm guessing the body of knowledge which activists had to work with
#
also evolved including things like how do you build narratives and how do you you know
#
so tell me a little bit about sort of this process of evolving from well-intentioned
#
people going out on the streets to you know building institutions building frameworks
#
getting young people into the fray so on and so forth.
#
So that JP Naik incident that didn't happen I was not involved in that that was Veena
#
Mazumdar and JP Naik actually advised Veena Mazumdar and other members to hold a press
#
conference which they did to put out the findings of that report and by that time then it was
#
a fate to complete and nothing could be done to sit on it otherwise we might never have
#
seen that report so it's actually thanks to that strategy that we actually have this
#
report in front of us today and it was able to go to the UN and so on.
#
Inside the I mean that was a that was an important lesson which Veena Di passed on to many of
#
us through because she was a great support to us when we were setting up Manushi she
#
provided space and an umbrella for discussions and such like and that was her advice to us
#
as well that yes do the things you do but also talk about them.
#
Now I don't think we've been very good at that in some ways until recently I think inside
#
the women's movement we have kind of felt that yeah we are doing what we are doing and
#
we will continue to do that but that in it is sufficient in itself.
#
Partly it is because much of the time what we were doing was firefighting you know just
#
issues came up we would react to them and then they would take up all your energy then
#
you would do something else and so on it's only in recent years and I think a number
#
of things have come together to build that sense one of them is that there are a lot
#
of younger feminists who are hungry for literature information histories that they don't have
#
and they are questioning that why has there been so little documentation.
#
Another is that many of us are actually growing older and we are realizing how much there
#
was that we didn't document it's not to say that we didn't do anything obviously we published
#
a lot of books many others did also the 70s the mid 70s were also the time when women
#
studies came in as a discipline and India was in the lead internationally in trying
#
to bring women studies in and that enabled us to study to find ways of studying areas
#
which were earlier not seen as legitimate areas for academic inquiry that is inside
#
the home you know you all legitimate academic inquiry and research focused on the public
#
world but now it became possible to study the domestic the private world intimate world
#
so some literature started also to be generated from there so and then of course you have
#
later the coming of the internet so now that women's organizations certain kind have been
#
around for a while they are all beginning to realize that they also need to house and
#
capture their histories if you look at something like a much older organization from the 1920s
#
the all India women's conference they have you know in a sense become such an established
#
institution that something like feminism I don't even know if the meanings of feminism
#
are debated in there but a hostel is run for women and all kinds of other things I think
#
children's home that kind of thing but even now today they too are feeling the need to
#
document their histories and so they're putting them together so that there is a record and
#
I think there is also another thing that we became aware of overall which was the absence
#
of women's stories the absence of a trajectory of women's rights in the school curriculum
#
in academia so there we were fighting for women's rights being out on the streets doing
#
things but we were we needed to see that we needed to be present and visible in other
#
fields as well and I think that that realization was then what led to a lot of work trying
#
to get women's histories into textbooks so the changes that came about 10 years ago introduced
#
a lot of stuff about women of course academic books and so on it's there and now of course
#
in publishing also you find it so I don't know if that answers your question because
#
I think somewhere along the way I lost track of it.
#
No the question was you know also how institutions come up and how that changes the landscape
#
because you know once you go from you know randomly organized groups of activists to
#
actual institutions and institution building I think a different set of incentives also
#
come into play and I am of course not familiar with the feminist movement and the institutions
#
therein but I am familiar with sort of some parts of the social sector and the danger
#
that I see is that you will have an NGO come up or an institution built with the very best
#
of intentions but then the incentives kick in of fundraising that you got to you know
#
do your next fundraising round because that is how you survive that's what you have to
#
focus on and sometimes to raise the funds there might be one area of work which is sexier
#
so to say or more in trend than some other area of work and you have to speak a certain
#
kind of language and you have to go in a particular direction and the danger there is that you
#
can lose your original sense of mission or what got you out there and of course it keeps
#
churning because you know just as there is culture and there is counterculture and then
#
the counterculture gets co-opted but more counterculture comes up I assume that that
#
you know that wheel sort of keeps on turning but you know so within your movement give
#
me a sense of has that been something that is a bit of an issue where institutions at
#
one level would be a huge advantage in terms of providing the backbone and the support
#
and the pedagogy for young workers in the field but at the same time there is a danger
#
of mission creep or not being not having the flexibility to sort of you know explore as
#
Yeah always I think that's always there and that has very much been there in the women's
#
movement as well but I think in a sense the yardstick by which we judge the activities
#
of women those that come out of the women's movement can't be that different from what
#
we look at elsewhere because we seem to we seem to have a kind of expectation that whatever
#
women will do will come out perfect and ready but it's not that you know we are also learning
#
So when the first women's institutions or women's groups were set up for example out
#
of the dowry movement grew anti-dowry movement grew a need for legal aid and counseling of
#
people facing issues with dowry and therefore legal aid and counseling centers came up.
#
Out of that movement grew a need for shelter homes so therefore a couple of shelter homes
#
So it is completely true that then to keep those institutions running other priorities
#
come up which have to do with funding which have to do with other things which might compromise
#
what you're doing and that is an occupational hazard that you have to deal with.
#
I think that it hasn't been an easy thing for feminist groups to deal with it but what
#
has helped is always keeping your goal in front of you and saying this is what we want
#
to do this is really where we want to go.
#
Now if you are if you're set up a women's shelter and your funder is saying to you no
#
I want you to do stuff for children then the choice is very clear no do you really want
#
to do that if you don't want to do that then you have to go and find other money or you
#
have to find different ways of running the shelter.
#
I remember an occasion where for the women's shelter that was being set up in Delhi the
#
state has schemes by which they provide funds and I remember these very tense negotiations
#
going on with the state I don't recall what came of it but I think that the center refused
#
to take money from the state eventually because one of the things that is required for a women's
#
shelter is to have its address secret so that the women can be safe but in the state documents
#
they wanted the address everywhere which would mean that every clerk every officer would
#
have access and it could go anywhere and everywhere so you couldn't compromise on that so you
#
had to then give up that kind of funding so they are faced with difficult choices like
#
that and some deal well with it and some don't and that I think is with any institutions
#
that you create you some can manage to hold them to their original ideals and some can't
#
but I think there's another thing which is very important which doesn't get talked about
#
that much and which is how to deal with power how to deal with hierarchy how to deal with
#
letting go of power let's say so for us the lessons we learned in the women's movement
#
were the lessons of working collectively now how do you bring collective functioning to
#
bear on an institution where the line of responsibility has to be very clear and so we had to think
#
about okay how do we do this and that brought up the bigger issue of let's say the capitalist
#
world in which we live and I don't want to talk in jargon so I'm just going to say this
#
once and the ways in which corporate organizations function we are saying we reject all of that
#
we reject the exploitative dealing with the workers etc etc but are we able to set up
#
our institutions such that they work effectively and efficiently and can give us the results
#
that we are looking for or do we need to rethink our view and have let's say take what's best
#
out of this corporate world capitalist world that we don't like and implement it in ways
#
that tie in with our politics I think that is a dilemma that many feminist institutions
#
of my generation of women are dealing with today trying to figure out I mean I think
#
in many ways we have kind of understood the business of hierarchy we have kind of understood
#
that hierarchies do not get removed and are not so easily wiped out so better to accept
#
them and see if we can implement a hierarchy which is democratic which is transparent which
#
is respectful but which you know which is clear about where the buck stops where responsibility
#
lies so that you can actually function and many are accepting of that but many have still
#
not dealt with or come to terms with okay how then do you make a transition I mean the
#
in Zuban this is a thing we are grappling with and I deal with it think about it every
#
day of my life now I'm 70 years old I set up this institution 40 years ago it has outgrown
#
me I can see how it has outgrown me and I can see how it is healthy for it to outgrow
#
me and there has to be a way for new leadership to come and for me to be able to exit and
#
that has to be a way that is happy for everybody and that you know works well for the institution
#
but many of us are unable to let go and what is it we are unable to let go of is it power
#
but we've always said we are against power so these are the dilemmas and questions that
#
we are dealing with and I actually find it very exciting and very interesting because
#
I think it's in a sense a challenge for us to see how do we deal with this so when I
#
think of feminist institution building I think of the histories I think of the struggles
#
within the institution but I also think of something else that I haven't talked about
#
which is also that what does it actually mean to build a feminist institution and say as
#
a publishing house as long as you publish feminist content is it enough and you treat
#
your workers badly and you pay them bad salaries is it is that enough or do somewhere you have
#
to separate the politics from the professional thing and say okay these are people working
#
with me they need to run their lives etc. those are questions also which are very difficult
#
to confront and I think institutions are dealing with them but what is exciting for me is we
#
are at least talking about them you know how many how many big corporates actually talk
#
about this I don't know is that structure even set up or how many small corporates talk
#
about this so to me that's the value of feminism. I also sort of want to talk about how any
#
movement any ideological movement any you know movement like feminism has also been
#
affected by technology in the sense that what has happened in the last decade and a half
#
perhaps is with social media coming up social media creates a space for you know what one
#
could call posturing which is you know I've had episodes with people like Kavita Krishnan
#
and Manjima Bhattacharya who sort of spoke about this aspect of the thing also and Kavita
#
being at pains to point out that you know real activism is you're out on the ground
#
you're doing things you're doing all of that but today it's become easy for anyone to pose
#
as a feminist just by putting a few angry tweets up and boom you're an activist you're
#
in the cause and often that will be you know accompanied by all kinds of newfangled theory
#
but how committed are you really and when the posturing happens the incentives of social
#
media will always drive the posturing towards the extremes so you will always be passing
#
judgment on others because that makes you feel virtuous and you will always condemn
#
them for not being pure enough while the real world is incredibly messy and one sort of
#
distressing example for me was when Kamala Bhasin died recently and you know Kamala Bhasin
#
at some point had said something which people felt was politically incorrect and there were
#
young feminists who castigated her for that and came out against her and you know ignoring
#
a lifetime of incredible work and all the women she's inspired and so on and so forth
#
right which is just so what do you sort of feel about this because it is and I think
#
everyone would acknowledge that generational change is good that young people bring new
#
ways of looking at things that you can look at things at intersections where you couldn't
#
see earlier you can look at how Dalit women are doing you can look at how trans people
#
are doing all that is great our gaze is sharper it's deeper but there is also so much sort
#
of posturing so much anger so much realness that that you know sometimes it can have the
#
opposite impact instead of opening up dialogues instead of you know making the whale fall
#
from you know letting layers fall from people's eyes so they can see the truth for what it
#
is it can have the impact of sort of pushing people away so you know what is your sense
#
of this like at one point Manjima who's you know studied feminism and all of that said
#
that you know these days I don't even like to call myself a feminist because of how the
#
word is you know how people think of the word so you know what's your sense of that see
#
I think Amit there are many things over there one of them is I think it's always important
#
to look at history as we my generation of people as feminists we were lucky in the sense
#
that as we came into our feminism we kind of moved into street level activism on different
#
issues and there was never a moment where we sat back and said okay so I'm a feminist
#
now what you know whereas today with the increasing kind of difficulty of public protest particular
#
kind of activism campaigning etc if you become you feel yourself a feminist you feel that
#
you're in empathy with the goals of whatever the thinking of feminism what do you do what
#
you do to actually live that feminism we lived it in our political lives and we lived it
#
in our personal lives and people's existences these days are so lived on the internet so
#
then you start sometimes living your feminism over there I mean I often I'm basing this
#
on my discussions often with my students who will say to me so ma'am now I'm a feminist
#
but how do I join feminism what do I do you know and it's a genuine query because what
#
do you do there isn't a you know a movement up there that you can become a member of you
#
can go and say okay I want to join this or whatever so how do you actually do this nobody
#
really knows and then so that's one thing and I think another is the kind of space the
#
internet fosters where instant expression of something becomes your preferred mode and
#
there's no taking it back no so it kind of pushes you into taking positions which you
#
might otherwise on reflection maybe put out in a more nuanced way so I think there is
#
also that I think there's also a lot of anger and I see anger as often as a fairly productive
#
emotion if you can actually channel it into discussions and questioning but sometimes
#
that doesn't happen and yes it is true that that kind of anger and what you call posturing
#
often stops discussion and dialogue and you cited the kind of attacks on Kamla as one
#
example of that and that's true those attacks were extremely hurtful to Kamla but I think
#
the argument that often young people make you know is that you might suppose it were
#
a man who has been like a wonderful scholar thinker said all the right things and then
#
you have a case of sexual harassment against him are you going to say let's forget this
#
he's done so much in his life which is the argument that was used against I mean on behalf
#
of many people so why should we kind of have different standards and I think in some ways
#
it is kind of incumbent upon those of us who become the targets of this attack to open
#
up the dialogue to reflect and say what have we done wrong etc all of that and to see it
#
as something that can perhaps lead to a deeper discussion but I think that requires getting
#
over the hurt which is tough and also sort of telling yourself that this is not personal
#
but there is a power equation that's kind of being addressed over here so you know after
#
Kamla that thing incident happened with Kamla I recall so I wrote a piece in the Indian Express
#
about young women's activism and it was written when Natasha and Devangana were released and
#
I cited many names but I made a mistake it was a mistake I did not mention the names
#
of young Muslim activists.
#
I mentioned Fatima Sheikh who was Savithri Bhai Phule's partner and who helped her set
#
up schools in the 19th century but I did not mention Muslim young activists and I should
#
have done and I realized that later and I tried to do it you know to before the article
#
were finalized but I didn't do it didn't manage to do it and I initial response to that piece
#
was very positive but then I got criticism some reproach and some hurt from young Muslim
#
activists and there it was completely justified I mean lucky for me that they couched it in
#
terms of disappointment rather than anger but it wasn't that the disappointment didn't
#
pinch or hurt but they were right and you know my generation of people so my colleagues
#
were very upset about this and they said you must respond and I said no no I you know I
#
have written what I've written and they've said what they've said etc but they said no
#
you have to do them the respect of responding so I did respond just a line on our website
#
because I'm not on social media otherwise just to say that I'm sorry and it was a mistake
#
and thanks for pointing it out and I'll make sure I don't do it again but in a sense I
#
think that you have to engage then it's like somebody attacks you then either you just
#
ignore that attack or you say okay why and I think if you say why you keep the dialogue
#
open but it's not easy.
#
You know one of my friends who runs a sort of a discussion group has a ground rule for
#
the group which I hold to in fact be a great ground rule for all interactions which is
#
assume goodwill right and what I find sometimes happening is that young people today and these
#
are the shallower sort of young people who are into signaling and posturing online are
#
not really looking for true discussion they're looking for a gotcha moment so they can you
#
know be outraged and they can display their own virtue and they can embrace victimhood
#
and so on and so forth in your case these guys might have been polite but for a lot
#
of people they get attacked in ways that are not polite you can have a mob coming down
#
on you and I think the sort of the decent thing to do is assume goodwill like if you
#
hadn't put in the name of a Muslim activist the default assumption should be not that
#
she is biased against them but that she just forgot you know that should be the default
#
assumption and then you can express your heard that hey we weren't included in a pleasant
#
way and I'm guessing these guys were polite enough and and then you respond and I completely
#
agree with that but what I often see happening is that mobs come down on you because people
#
are just looking for those gotcha moments and that fundamental principle that I would
#
like to see put in play place of assume goodwill you know until you actually have concrete
#
reason to believe otherwise but just assume goodwill you know and you can have good nature
#
dialogues you can have polite conversation but you know one doesn't see enough of that
#
and even in Kamla's case I think that the judgments passed on her were uncharitable
#
and harsh for that reason I'm not saying that if someone does something wrong you should
#
excuse them on the basis of having done good things before I mean that you can excuse anything
#
with that I agree with you on that but I just personally felt that those judgments felt
#
harsh and uncharitable and sometimes we just need to kind of take a step back have the
#
dialogue say the things that need to be said but you know in that spirit of we are all
#
in this together and you know until you have reason to believe otherwise.
#
Yeah I agree on that but I also think that and you're right to say that you know there
#
are mob attacks and the internet is a very toxic space very often but see if we are just
#
if we talk about the statement on Kamla yeah what I wanted to say was it wasn't only young
#
people and it's never only young people it's so in a sense starring young people with that
#
brush is not entirely fair and in that letter they went I don't know how many signatories
#
900 or so signatories to it there were many many older feminists also many people that
#
I know who had also signed it.
#
The second thing is you're right to say that yes the person has done so much etc in the
#
past all that is true but many people may not know that you know so I don't know how
#
many of the people who would have signed that statement would have been aware of Kamla's
#
history and if they had just listened to what she said in that little clip that was circulating
#
I suppose on that they could build a case of tremendous anger so I'm not making an
#
excuse I'm just trying to see where this is coming from and why it takes the form that
#
it does and it could just be that.
#
Let's talk about your publishing years also which is so sort of inspiring and you worked
#
at OUP you worked in OUP in Delhi then you worked at OUP in London and you know you worked
#
in Zedbooks in London doing you know working in a similar area but then you came back and
#
in 1984 you founded Kali for Women with Ritu Menon.
#
So tell me a bit about where that came from that you know having sort of in those years
#
the audacity to say that I'll do a startup you know and I'll do this kind of startup
#
which you know is not going to scale and be incredibly profitable but I will do this because
#
it needs to be done because at a fundamental level also therefore and correct me if I'm
#
wrong but Kali for Women would seem to be different from all other publishing houses
#
in the sense that other publishing houses would be set up to maybe find people who are
#
already writing on subjects that are already written about so it's kind of more of the
#
same there is a market you're chasing the market but it seems to me that what would
#
have animated you guys would be that nobody is doing this it needs to be done we'll create
#
the market you know we'll ask people to write for us these stories don't exist they would
#
not exist without us we'll be the catalyst so is that a correct characterization and
#
tell me a little bit then about you know what drove you to do it and your early days were
#
there self doubts what was that period like?
#
You know when I look back on it now I don't understand how I could have done it what I
#
was 32 years old you know at 32 you give up a job and start something new with no money
#
where does that kind of foolishness come from and I think what was it that sort of you know
#
you're so bindaas ke ho jayega kisi na kisi taren se ho jayega and one of the things
#
I know today with 40 years of this thing behind me is that in moments of despair and of course
#
there are moments of despair because publishing the kind of stuff we do is very hard and you
#
never know from one year to the next whether you're going to survive and we have no buffer
#
no backup and I despair now and again you know I have made one or two or three maybe
#
attempts to try and stabilize the publishing we are doing by trying to get in somebody
#
to invest in it so that we have a little bit of money a little bit of backing and nobody
#
has ever shown interest in investing none of my friends none of these good friends I
#
know who have invested their life savings in publishing but they will not put it into
#
women's publishing so often when I'm trying that and it doesn't work and I despair then
#
I think you know we've survived 40 years without any money we have only survived on our wits
#
and on the little money that we earn and we publish damn good books so it's how have we
#
been able to do that maybe that is enough to feel happy about so that's just when I
#
look back on it but yes I don't know what gave me the courage to do it but certainly
#
the motivation was as I told you before that recognizing that there was a huge gap in the
#
knowledge available to us and knowledge about women and seeing that nobody was willing to
#
fulfill that gap and so thinking okay I'll do it myself but of course and in the initial
#
years it was just me Ritu joined up a little later of course thinking about it was one
#
thing doing it was quite another so I started thinking about it quite early on and I didn't
#
actually do it I kept talking myself into it that's how I do things I just talk myself
#
into it so and then in the middle of all of that came this unexpected interruption that
#
in the form of a Fulbright fellowship to go to the United States and study there and so
#
when you're 30 that's what I was at that time you you don't say no to a Fulbright fellowship
#
to the US so I was actually on my way there when and I stopped in London to spend a little
#
time there and met with people from Zedbooks who I knew the editor from Zedbooks Robert
#
Maltino who passed away recently Robert had come to India and he'd met me and we chatted
#
he knew some friends of mine and everything and they said why are you going to Hawaii
#
you don't know how to swim you don't know how to surf you know why don't you stay here
#
and work with us and that was you know the aha moment for me because I thought this is
#
what I really want to do why am I going to Hawaii so I gave up on that and stayed on
#
and worked there and it was towards the end of that stint by which time I had talked so
#
much about this that there was nothing else I could do but start it that Ritu got in touch
#
she was with because at that time and she wanted to opt out and she was starting to
#
publish a few books about women so we knew each other professionally we were not friends
#
or anything because there were a handful of women in publishing at that time so she then
#
said it sounds very interesting let's join up and why don't we do this together and we
#
decided to do that together so we had no money and we both gave up our jobs or not
#
quite gave up our jobs continued to do them to earn a little bit of money but started
#
this on the side and then gradually we gave them up and Ritu's husband provided us with
#
their garage and he set it up for us and we opened an office now our idea was to publish
#
books by women and about women and we went out to seek women writers because of course
#
very few of them were getting published so there was no you know a lot of writers that
#
you could draw on as you yourself said most publishing houses publish known writers we
#
were completely breaking new ground nobody could understand what we were talking about
#
and we started with two or three books that we had in our head went out to seek writers
#
one of the interesting things we found was that women themselves had very little confidence
#
in their writing so the thing that we had to do was to work with them to talk to them
#
to tell them that actually what you have to say is worth saying and convince them of that
#
and that's how we would sort of manage to get books from them and we started with just
#
two books and then it slowly grew to a few more we weren't paying ourselves anything
#
we had no rent to pay so we had very low overheads and we had no employees we got one employee
#
much later at I think 700 rupees a month a young man called Joe's Anthony who was in
#
despair because he used to get letters addressed to Miss Joe's Anthony which used to give us
#
a lot of to laugh about because we would tell him you know now you know what we faced all
#
our lives because we are forever called Mr. Butalia Mr. Menon so and then it slowly grew
#
with some help from a bunch of women who helped us to locate authors but also because we had
#
so much support from within the women's movement you know that people recognize Kali as being
#
their publishing house bringing out books for them so they would you know go and ask
#
her when is the next Kali book coming out etc and people would be really surprised because
#
it was like saying and I mean nobody asks for books by their publisher except for Mills
#
and Boone romances you know and we couldn't have been at a further distance from them
#
so that really was how it started in the early days we did a bit of jugard we found out our
#
skills as editors we earned money we put it into Kali and slowly the list grew over a
#
period of time and because we kept the overheads low it paid for itself in the beginning and
#
I mean whatever little we earned could go towards paying the costs later it became more
#
difficult because things became more expensive and we had to think of other ways of doing
#
it and and there's this lovely story about this book that I heard of for the first time
#
but I can't wait to kind of find it and look at it which you published in 1989 called Sharir
#
ki Jaankari and it was written by these 75 women who came to you and it was really a
#
book that you know showed a woman in a lehenga and you live different parts of the lehenga
#
and there are different body parts and explanations about them demystifying the body as it were
#
and in fact there's you have this nice anecdote about how you had to find a new printer because
#
the boys at your regular printer would get excited by all this lehenga lifting so you
#
had to find a printer which had women employees who would presumably get less excited so you
#
know how well did that book do for example and commercially was it viable on its own
#
like quite apart from the fact that of course you're not paying rent you're in the garage
#
overheads are low you have one employee Miss Jose and you know so at what point did it
#
sort of become a viable business on its own and did you get the sense that we are growing
#
a market we are not just publishing books that don't exist but we are growing a market
#
of people who want such books and then that demand will create its own supply did you
#
get a sense that you know by getting the first few books like that out there you were inspiring
#
others to write for you because now there was something to look at and say ki haan ye
#
Yeah well that book Sharir ki Jaankari that was so that book was very significant for
#
us in many ways to me it still remains one of the most important books we've done because
#
in a sense when we started to publish even though we were quite convinced that we wanted
#
to publish diverse voices and one of our first books was a book of translations of seven
#
short stories from different Indian languages where Hashweta Devi was published for the first
#
time in English her adult work she didn't she wasn't as well known and Ishmachuk dai also.
#
Even though we wanted to do that it was also clear to us after a few years that really
#
the women we were publishing it was important to bring out their voices but they came from
#
our class and as feminist publishers we needed to reach out much further we couldn't be in
#
a country like India we couldn't be part of a movement that was so diverse and really
#
be publishing only the cream of the thing so how to reach out we didn't know how to
#
do that really we're thinking about it and then this book came to us and these were women
#
who had been part of the women's development program of the Rajasthan government the central
#
government and the Rajasthan government together and they had created this book in workshops
#
health workshops and they brought it to us and they told us this story which I never
#
tired of telling which is that they experimented they created two books by hand and they experimented
#
with it in the village and that's when people laughed at them and said you know it's not
#
a realistic book because you never see a naked woman or a naked man in a village so you've
#
shown naked bodies how can this be realistic and that's when they went back and thought
#
about it and then came up with this ingenious idea of creating a fully dressed woman and
#
a man dressed in the dhoti and with his chest bare and then you can lift up the dhoti or
#
you can lift up the lehenga and you see how the woman is made from inside and that's and
#
then we you know our printer did that book and then all his little boys in the bindery
#
were looking at these things so we had to find a group of women binders which one of
#
my colleagues found for us she traveled all around Delhi and found for us so that book
#
actually we've not sold a single copy through a bookshop it all it always went to women
#
at the village level so we initially printed 2000 copies before we had finished printing
#
the women had pre-sold 1800 copies and we later did more and more and to this day I've
#
lost count but I think between 75 to 80,000 have been printed yeah and we've never lost
#
money on it but we've never made money on it we kind of broken even every copy has gone
#
either to an NGO or to women's groups and others it's been translated into a few languages
#
it's been pirated I think at one time it was even pirated by a government because they
#
ordered 22,000 copies from us and then they came back and said why can't we print it ourselves
#
and we said no you can't because it's our copyright and then they cancelled the order
#
so I think they went ahead and printed it anyway but who knows so that book opened particular
#
doors to us and also made us rethink you know I've also talked about this often the women
#
impose two conditions on us for that book one was that we would never make a profit
#
from it not that we would never make a profit that we would never sell a copy to a village
#
woman at a profit she would get it at cost and we could sell it in the market otherwise
#
the second was that the all 75 of their names must appear as authors on the book and because
#
this was a collectively sourced collectively written book so eventually of course we did
#
we were foxed by this demand but we put all 75 names on the back and the front cover doesn't
#
have any names on it so that opened many doors and made us rethink many of our assumptions
#
and yes we did have the sense that we were creating a market it was very clear because
#
interest was growing and therefore our publishing was also growing at which point did it become
#
viable well in the early years actually even though we didn't have any funding I mean any
#
investment or anything in it we did have some funding we got I think a grant or something
#
of maybe one lakh in the first year and then we did this jugard of different doing different
#
kinds of work and earning money and adding that so for every freelance job we did we
#
would earn money for one book and we would put it into Kali and then we went to the people
#
who had given us funding for this one book and went back to them and said look we are
#
now at a point where we think if we can make the leap into being a little bit self-sufficient
#
but we need a little bit of money and would you be willing to give us that and not tie
#
it to specific books but to a number of books so they agreed and we got about four lakhs
#
from them and we published those books that came out of that money I think by about year
#
six or seven we were breaking even and some years we made a small profit but small profit
#
was like one lakh two lakhs maybe three lakhs that's it and then of course we split in after
#
nineteen years of working together we split but up until the time that we were working
#
together I don't think we ever made a loss we would we just managed to cover our costs
#
and we didn't need to bring in other forms of money to keep it going but subsequently
#
we have had a much more difficult time because what started to happen was by about year seven
#
or eight when it became clear that there was a market the profile of publishing had also
#
changed in India and was changing a little more so the big companies started to come
#
in because when we started there was nobody Penguin came in three years after us as an
#
independent publisher and then a few others came in and then gradually I think it was
#
would have been early nineties or something like that I forget yeah early nineties when
#
the companies the larger companies began to come in and then they all spotted that opportunity
#
that okay here is a publisher who's created this space here are authors and so they started
#
to take the authors away so which of course is in the fitness of things because authors
#
must go I suppose where they get more money and more exposure but it was it it was tough
#
to deal with you know you do all the groundwork of it's sort of locating and writer bringing
#
them to public attention and then somebody who has much more resources than you creams
#
it off it took us a while to be philosophical about that stop feeling angry about it but
#
that was what happened and that is also what made it a little difficult for us to you know
#
keep making that investment of finding new people and then knowing that they would go
#
away and economically it's not a good model but it's I suppose what we've chosen to do
#
and you know even though you say that we always made a profit or we at least broke even the
#
truth is when you think of you know what economists call opportunity cost what could you have
#
done instead and instead I'm sure both of you individually could have made far more
#
money in other ventures and yet you chose to do this and therefore it is like a labor
#
of love and sometimes I think about that and other similar labors of love and it strikes
#
me that when you are creating value in the world there should be a I mean I would imagine
#
in my idealistic way that you should be able to get that money back and make profits and
#
so on I mean one of the changes I see in the creator economy in the last three or four
#
years is that people can actually with their labors of love without being dependent on
#
mainstream platforms or gatekeepers or whatever make enough money to get by and be independent
#
and and myself being an example of that in a sense so you know when you sort of look
#
here now at 2022 like you know you guys split and you founded Zuban in 2003 you even had
#
a big hit with Baby Haldar's A Lifeless Ordinary among many other books that were coming out
#
but now when you look back at what technology has done where technology in a sense to some
#
extent has dissipated attention you know maybe people with creative urges women creators
#
can find that there are other ways in which they can express themselves and tell their
#
stories and not necessarily write a book or do it in print you know when you look at the
#
landscape today what do you think like do you think that if you were young today if
#
you were 20 today would you necessarily start a publishing house which would bring out books
#
or would you you know would there be other things that would excite you what's what's
#
your sense of this well i think even at 70 there are lots of other things that excite
#
me i'm sorry i didn't mean to make it sound like that no no i couldn't resist that but
#
no but you're right i think if i was to start something today it certainly wouldn't be only
#
books i think one of our and by our i mean the collective community of publishers not
#
just us in zuban one of our failings has been that we have been so reluctant to let go of
#
the printed book giving it a permanence which actually historically when you look at the
#
development of publishing you see how the form of the book has changed over the years
#
so from being on let's say palm leaf manuscripts or vellum which we didn't have in india because
#
it was the skin of the the calf it has moved to paper so when it moved to paper in about
#
the 18th or 19th century it moved for different reasons and one of the reasons for moving
#
away from say vellum was how much how many skins you needed to make one book so how many
#
animals needed to be killed to make one book and it moved to paper paper was seen at that
#
time as an impermanent fragile material now we see it as a given and we see it as something
#
that has permanence but now what is happening i i think is another historical development
#
which is that we are moving away from paper and in the move away from paper it's again
#
in the fitness of things because paper destroys so many forests need so much water so much
#
though i love the form and shape of the book and there's nothing quite like the sense of
#
holding a book and reading it i also know that this is something that we have to rethink
#
and that we there are other ways of putting out knowledge and information and that we
#
have to think creatively about how we can survive on those other ways exactly like you
#
see so i think we're at the cusp of thinking about that i don't have any ideas i know that
#
this is something we have to think about and that's why i also feel a sense of urgency
#
for you know people of my age to find a mode of exit because then you kind of liberate
#
the thinking and more possibilities and opportunities can come up so i hope that that's going to
#
happen because the thing is that whatever form or shape it takes as long as people read
#
that's the important thing and as long as we can keep putting out content feminist content
#
content about women then how does it matter what form or shape you put it in i'll still
#
have my bookshelf you know till the day i die and then it'll go to somebody else but
#
that's the thing we have to think about yeah that's the circle of life and growth let's
#
sort of talk also about the books that you've written and the work that you've done and
#
i was particularly sort of fascinated by you know all the work you've done on partition
#
including the other side of silence and so tell me a little bit about how your interest
#
in that came about i mean i know you were researching for some film project and then
#
you kind of started looking into this and then it just grew and grew and grew and took
#
a life of its own so tell me a bit about what drove you to you know sort of explore these
#
areas and of course your mother had her own stories it was your anamama which is a story
#
with which you begin the book so you know was there that that personal history sort
#
of driving the the process or were you just sort of as soon as you started discovering
#
these stories you couldn't help yourself but dive into these rabbit holes what was that
#
like well there were two or three things that actually opened up this area for me or made
#
me start thinking about it one was that film i talk about which was a film that a documentary
#
that was being made by two friends of mine a guy called peter chapel and another guy
#
called sati khanna so sati apparently wanted to make a film on people's memories of partition
#
and peter is a cameraman and director and they got together and they were coming to
#
india to do the shooting and they got in touch with me because peter's then partner and peter
#
and i have a good friends he and his partner and i have a good friends so peter then asked
#
me if i would be willing to help them with a bit of research because even though they
#
were coming they hadn't actually done the research to identify people to talk to so
#
i did a bit of that and the area i started to hear very interesting stories i traveled
#
to amritsar i went to karnal i walked and talked to people in delhi i went to kanpur
#
i think a few other places and started listening to stories so something started you know raising
#
questions about this in my mind and i've always liked to listen to stories and just around
#
that time i think a little bit previously i had worked on another film which was with
#
salman rashdi very interesting so rashdi not many people know this was making a documentary
#
the first documentary he made on children of midnight because later he went on to make
#
another one and this was the first one he made with a director called jeff dunlop and
#
for some reason dunlop got in touch with me and asked if i could help them to identify
#
people across india for this film and i said no because we were also in the throes of setting
#
up kali and then he said okay could i just help them to look in delhi so i did that for
#
them and again i found a few people in chandni chonk and other places and again that kind
#
of opened up you know just stories about the moment of independence although these were
#
people who were born on the 15th of august so they didn't have any memory of that time
#
but it just set my hall in that context and then of course came indira gandhi's assassination
#
so that was the real catalyst because when she was assassinated and the city became like
#
something i had never seen with the kind of lurking violence beneath the surface which
#
in the kind of sheltered existence that i had led here as a middle-class woman i had never
#
suspected that it could be there and suddenly i could see it we you know we walked out of
#
our home and you could see buses lying carcasses of buses on the road tires burning and all
#
of that and the city came to a standstill really because the administration just collapsed
#
and lots of citizens got together to set up this group called nagarik ekta manch which
#
kind of spontaneously came together and they used to meet at lashpat bhavan every day and
#
they got permission from the police to work in the places where affected people were and
#
to try and provide relief and that kind of thing so we all joined up and my group of
#
five or six people was assigned the shakarpur camp which was across the river near geeta
#
colony in a school so people in shakarpur who had been badly impacted they were all
#
moved from their houses into a school which was closed at that time because it was the
#
sera vacation so i worked there and my specific task was to take down people's stories for
#
compensation claims and such like and that is the first time that i started hearing about
#
partition with people just eliding the two you know saying it was like partition again
#
and then they were talking about 84 but they were talking about 47 actually and it just
#
kept coming back and back and i started to think about it and that's really when i also
#
started to talk to my mother for the first time to see what was it like and we'd heard
#
her stories all the time but just ignored them and she was also surprised to hear of
#
this interest but gradually she began to open up about it and then i took the decision that
#
i was going to go and see my uncle in pakistan and it took until that time i had no idea
#
of a book in mind i just wanted to you know talk to him and see him and it wasn't until
#
much later that i started thinking of writing a book initially the listening to my uncle's
#
story bringing it back to my mother and her siblings their resentment their anger then
#
turning into you know affection love all of that i watched all of that in fascination
#
and i started just talking to people randomly it was completely a random thing any academic
#
would trash it saying there was no sample there was nothing i just went from story to
#
story one person told me something and said talk to this one then i would go there and
#
i became like these antennae you know i would be walking somewhere and i would see two people
#
one person looking that age and i'd go up to them and say where are you from and they
#
would i learned to recognize this question they answered with in punjabi saying meaning
#
now or then and realize how time was divided in their mind according to before partition
#
or after partition and so people were generous they told me stories it wasn't until much
#
later that i started recording them but once i started recording them then it kind of added
#
up and then i discovered this gurdwara in jangpura where the survivors of the march
#
47 ravel pindi attack had come and they had settled in jangpura and i used to live in
#
jangpura you know when i came to delhi in the early days and didn't know anything about
#
this but then went to the gurdwara where every year on the 13th of march they have a ceremony
#
to remember the survivors of partition and from there i got to know a lot of families
#
and talk to them so it was just like that but also it was not concentrated research
#
you know it was spread over 10 years because i was working and i had no funding for it
#
because i was not doing it through some academic thing so there would be months when i would
#
do nothing and then i'd hear a story and i'd go and talk to that person and that would
#
become you know an ongoing interaction so on all academic counts it was completely the
#
wrong thing to do you know research spread over a long period random stories no pattern
#
no sample no nothing but at some point i decided who cares about academics i can't be bothered
#
this you know this is a story i want to tell so i told it in my way you know you'd earlier
#
in this conversation you'd refer to heer ranjha and in the context of you know your writings
#
on partition you also reproduce this beautiful poem by amrita pritam called i ask you warish
#
shah and i'll and of course the author of heer ranjha and i'll i'll just sort of read
#
that out because i love it so much let your voice rise from within your grave when one
#
he died in panjab you penned an epic lament now that hundreds of heers are being violated
#
why are you silent warish shah i ask you warish shah let your voice rise from within your
#
grave stop quote and to me you know this poem is as important for us to understand partition
#
and what it did as as a historical document would be as an academic paper would be and
#
you know in your essay for the latest edition of the book you spoke about how you realized
#
that you would have to go beyond academics and beyond history to understand and document
#
partition you know you cited james young who you know was writing about the holocaust and
#
how do we remember the holocaust and uh and his point was that we have to go past history
#
we have to quote know the holocaust through its literary fictional historical political
#
representations and through his personal testimonial representations for it is not only the facts
#
of any event that are important but equally how people remember those facts and how they
#
represent them stop quote and i i found this wonderful fluidity in all your writing on
#
partition as well where you know just as you've been courteous enough to avoid jargon in our
#
conversation today is written in simple language as your early teacher advised you in college
#
is written from the heart and so what was then your approach towards form was it something
#
that you arrived at organically over a period of time that i'll let the story tell itself
#
and all of that and or um you know did you start with a particular conception key you
#
know the academic point of view one might have thought about or this is history i have
#
to tell it like another thing that i really liked in your work is that you weren't hesitant
#
of putting the eye in there putting the personal in there this was your journey in discovering
#
all of this and you put that in there and that makes it so much richer for me whereas
#
you know conventional historians or journalists would might say don't use the eye and all
#
that but you're engaging with all of this because this is a living history also so tell
#
me a bit about you know how you evolve to your approach towards this so amit you know
#
as i said that the research and thinking and writing and talking to people was quite random
#
when there came a point when i took all the material i had and one of the things that
#
i made sure i did was i transcribed each interview myself i didn't want somebody else to do it
#
for me i knew the material i knew the people i wanted to be close to them so i transcribed
#
everything myself and i just let the material sit there and steep until it could suggest
#
a pattern to me it wasn't easy because i thought of many things and one of the things that
#
i thought of was that i would include you know the full text of all the interviews and
#
let them speak for themselves but then i changed my mind about that and it was my editor at
#
penguin also who advised me on that and said don't do that because the interviews will
#
start sounding alike after a while and that was true so eventually i think what i did
#
was that four or five of those interviews i decided were the ones that were going to
#
inform what i was doing and quite honestly i didn't know until i started writing it what
#
form it would take all i had in front of me was the rana mama chapter which i had written
#
and which had been published in granter so in a sense that was both enabling and quite
#
defeating because that chapter you know was there as a done thing now could i change it
#
could i expand on it should i just leave it what should i do with it and then i decided
#
that okay i would append my mother's interview to it and suddenly that structure revealed
#
itself to me and that was what led me to using basically one detailed interview with each
#
chapter that i did i didn't know that i mean i i didn't know when i started writing whether
#
the interview would appear at the beginning of the chapter or at the end of the chapter
#
and as you may have seen i do all of that in one chapter it appears at the end another
#
one it is the beginning another one it goes right through the chapter so i just let that
#
thing work work itself organically really some of the things you do you don't realize
#
so for example until one of the readers of my book when it went to an american publisher
#
they sent it to an academic to read and that academic wrote a report and one of the things
#
she pointed out in it was that every chapter starts with a single has a single word title
#
i didn't know this you know i had just done the titles it was not a conscious thing when
#
she said that i thought oh wow yes it does you know suddenly something kind of revealed
#
itself to me in that but i think the structure really just grew organically when i look back
#
on it now i mean like when i was talking to you about kali and saying when i look back
#
at it i don't know how i had the courage to do that when i look back on this now i do
#
not know how i wrote this book in the interstices of time that i had because i was fully occupied
#
in my job in kali in working on it and it was long work days but i would come home and
#
then i would sit down with it in the time that i had and write it and that sometimes
#
that time was half an hour sometimes it was an hour sometimes it was a little more and
#
at the end of it i don't know how it flows like that but perhaps it's because it was
#
just a very deeply felt book this is lovely reflective para in your new introduction to
#
the latest edition where you write quote everything is different the person you were when you
#
wrote the book the context in which it was thought about and written the viewpoint from
#
which you are looking at it today if you as author are different so too is the external
#
environment in which the work took root in shape so much has changed in 20 years if in
#
the india of two decades ago the fault lines of our nation state were beginning to become
#
visible today the divisions are full blown and growing stop quote and i won't ask you
#
about the environment and the fault lines and all of that what really interests me is
#
how you talk about how you changed the the person that you were changed and i'll ask
#
you this a larger question not just in the context of the book but throughout this journey
#
you know how what are the ways in which you have changed as compared to say the 20 year
#
old you know or was she like when you kind of look back at that person you know what
#
are the different ways in which you've changed the things you've learned and what is there
#
which is essential to you which was at the core of that person then and is at the core
#
of this person today my feminism it's what i breathe what i live what i believe in what
#
i try to practice and i'm not just saying it like that you know it's a question for
#
me in every action i take in my life how do i deal with people how do i listen learn to
#
listen more and more and learn to reflect on what i'm listening to and take action only
#
after that etc so that the feminism is has remained at the core of all of this i wish
#
hope think imagine that what i have lived is a feminist life to the best of my ability
#
but of course that's not something that i can judge myself what has changed well i think
#
everybody changes which is a cliche of course i have become much less of an angry young
#
woman but that change began started coming into my life long before i became a feminist
#
i used to be i didn't think back i used to be a really bad tempered angry person and
#
would shout and scream and lose my temper and bang doors and all of those things and
#
i still remember that when i was 12 years old my elder brother sat me down and gave
#
me a lecture on this and said why do you do this and the funny thing is that he is extremely
#
volatile himself you know but i listened to him and i thought yeah he's right actually
#
it's me who's doing it you know it's not other people who are at fault and from that day
#
on i began to change so i sort of became very even tempered but when it's not that i don't
#
lose my temper but it's completely the opposite that i have to be have to have my back to
#
the wall i have to be driven in my back to the wall before i get angry and then anger
#
usually means silence so when i'm annoyed with my printer for that he's done a terrible
#
job with something he will know that madam is not saying anything so the other side of
#
your silence is quite possibly i hadn't thought of it like that but yeah otherwise i think
#
i've just grown into becoming more more tolerant more open more mellow all these things that
#
have come with age i have to say that i've i have enjoyed the process of aging more than
#
i imagined it you know when you're young you think but with every decade that has come
#
upon me i have actually really enjoyed that but in the writing of this book when i said
#
in the book that the person that you are is also different in many ways there is so much
#
more that i have learned about partition in the years that intervened between the writing
#
of that book and my coming back to it to revisit that story and you realize that there is just
#
so much you can explore in something and that also leads you to a whole range of other areas
#
so in a sense i don't know it's difficult i don't know how am i different i really don't
#
know because i think i'm like i'm really the same person who has just grown older and wiser
#
and has become more tolerant and more receiving of more accommodating of difference and of
#
different views and more able to engage in those kinds of conversations but you know
#
i'm still rotten at the internet i mean of course i use email and all of that but instagram
#
twitter that you know you need to do this to actually be where young people are and
#
to understand what they're doing but it kind of defeats me and i don't do that so i'm eager
#
to learn and yet some things i'm reluctant to learn i don't know i set myself a challenge
#
that before i turned 70 i would learn cycling because i missed out on cycling when i moved
#
from ambala to delhi and so i did i taught myself cycling and that's okay but the internet
#
i haven't yet conquered in the same way i think both of those are the right decision
#
cycling of course it makes you healthier and you get fresh air though i don't know delhi
#
me kitna fresh air but internet also i think not using it too much is a feature not a bug
#
because it is such a distraction so you'll get much more work done if you don't take
#
up instagram twitter trust me so a couple of final questions my penultimate question
#
is something i usually end the show with where i ask my guests to recommend books music films
#
that have meant a lot to them to me and to my to our listeners you know so not necessarily
#
a best-of list or anything like that but things that are close to your heart and that means
#
something to you that you cherish could be books about feminism could be books about
#
anything could be mills and goon could be you know any films music whatever what is
#
close to your heart you know this is a question you should never put to a publisher there
#
is no way i can answer this every single book that i have published that we have published
#
is really close to my heart let me make it easy for you so your authors don't beat you
#
up and nothing you've published can be included in this i know i knew you were going to say
#
that but even so i read so much and read so eclectically and so widely that it's really
#
hard for me to pin down anything and for years i have avoided this question so now you're
#
putting me on the spot and i really can't think of an answer but i'll let me see if
#
i can you know music films i love music and i love listening to all kinds of music and
#
i at one stage as a young person harbored like every young person does the desire to
#
be able to sing and all of that it's i'm useless at it and i think i'm tone deaf i can't sing
#
or to save my life although my family is very musical but yeah i love listening to music
#
and hindustani classical music is really what i listen to a lot one of my favorites is kumar
#
gandhar and his nirgun bhajans which are wonderful and also some of the you know bule sha and
#
others sung by nusrat and rechma and so many others those are things that i love because
#
those are somehow also so reminiscent for me of panjab and of the close links between
#
pakistan and panjab so those i really move me and i can listen to them endlessly at one
#
time i was very taken by the you know when you start reading so i'm not a religious person
#
at all but the ik umkar that comes at the beginning of the granth sahab when you start
#
opening the granth sahab and reading it i was very taken by harsh deep core's version
#
of it and i made it my ringtone on my phone and my colleagues gave me grief for so much
#
grief for it and they kept saying to me turn that damn thing off turn that thing off enough
#
you know so finally i had to give it up and i got a new phone the ringtone changed anyway
#
films wise i don't know but i would say uh some of the gurudat films chaudmika chand
#
pyaasa these are wonderful wonderful films which are really moving also i also say that
#
because i have a very dear friend who's worked on gurudat and has shown me you know those
#
talked about those films and broken them down for me in terms of light and song and and
#
all of that so some of those are rather wonderful and long ago i watched a film that stayed in my
#
mind i don't think it's a bollywood film but or sorry a hollywood film but it's an english
#
film called a question of silence the reason it stayed in my mind is it is a film in which
#
two women randomly kill somebody in a shop for a particular reason and are then defended by a woman
#
lawyer and it kind of stayed in my head because it speaks to the routine small acts of violence
#
that women face every day and what you were talking about the cumulative anger and how that
#
and how that anger sometimes finds an outlet in a completely irrational act i saw it a long time
#
ago i don't even remember when and i would never think of it as my favorite film but because you
#
pushed me to think of a film that one came to mind so i'm mentioning it i'm glad i pushed you
#
i can't wait to watch it myself and my final question uh a two-part question really if there
#
are young people who want to work with you how do they get in touch and if there are if there's
#
anyone listening to this who actually wants to contribute to your cause financially then how
#
are they to do so so young people wanting to work with us i mean they can just write to us
#
there aren't that many opportunities in zuban because it's a small organization
#
up until two years ago we used to run a very good even if i say it myself but a very solidly
#
thought out internship program and we used to advertise that people could apply and we would
#
then do a selection but it went for a toss because of the pandemic and now we are thinking of reviving
#
it so it'll take us some time to get that back on track because we want to do it properly in terms
#
of jobs also what we are doing is we are trying to make zuban a genuinely diverse and inclusive
#
space so we've taken a decision that for the immediate future whatever jobs we have will be
#
in reserved categories and we've already done two jobs like that and maybe one or two more
#
so people get very frustrated because they can't understand why and you know why this reserved
#
category thing but it's an important thing to do because and to me it's part of the feminism
#
that we want to practice but the job jobs in zuban are rare and we don't do projects on which people
#
can work but they can always write to us we are pretty good about that and we will get back to them
#
and tell them what's possible and what's not possible and in terms of people wanting to
#
contribute financially to zuban i mean we would welcome it and they can do that and
#
and what they can do is we actually don't have the details bank details up on our website
#
but if they write to us we can give them those and i'll put them up on the website also
#
and we do have atg and 12a so they can get a tax rebate on that if they want to so that would be
#
great because we sound like we are very successful but we are poor as church mice and we can always
#
do with more funds but that's not the most important thing i think in financial terms
#
you may be poor as church mice but looked at in other ways i think you you are rich and you've
#
enriched the world so thank you for coming on the show arvashi thank you amit pleasure talking to
#
you really enjoyed it if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with anyone you think
#
might be interested check out the show notes as well enter rabbit holes at will do explore
#
the books published by zuban and do also pick up urvashi's book especially the other side of
#
silence which i loved so much urvashi with much wisdom has stayed off social media but you know
#
i am not so wise you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse
#
past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
#
amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you you
